


by your hand is the only end

by storytellingape



Category: BlacKkKlansman (2018), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, The Kitchen (2019)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Big Gay Mobsters, Blood and Injury, Closeted Character, Detectives, Explicit Sexual Content, Gun Violence, Kylux Adjacent Ship, M/M, Minor Character Death, Morally Ambiguous Character, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Rimming, Slurs, Spoilers, Stalking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-19 13:16:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 52,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20657864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storytellingape/pseuds/storytellingape
Summary: Gabriel O'Malley flees New York for Colorado Springs where he builds a new life for himself.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chifuyu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chifuyu/gifts), [jeusus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeusus/gifts).

> Thank you to [@StaticRaining](https://twitter.com/StaticRaining) the best bean in the entire world, who put up with this fic and corrected my terrible grammar as much as she could. This would not have been possible without her support and constant cheering. Also to [Jeu](https://twitter.com/Techienician)! I wouldn't love this ship as much as I do without you. Sorry it's not (spoilers) mpreg lol, but I'm working on that, soon. Also a shoutout to [generalmpreg](https://twitter.com/generalmpreg) who shares my love of both mpreg and Los Campesinos!
> 
> For those of you who have not seen _**The Kitchen**_ **PLEASE BE WARNED** there are spoilers for a character in that film. This fic also mentions characters from both _**Blackkklansman**_ and _**The Kitchen**_, and while I think this would make a lot more sense having watched both, I think this can hold up on its own? Maybe, idk, lol. Please heed the tags: this fic is set in the late 70's and early 80's, and may contain upsetting themes/attitudes prevalent during that era, mirroring the themes of both movies but especially _**Blackkklansman**_. If that's not your cup of tea, feel free to go back. Otherwise, off you go!

* * *

Four years later, Gabriel flees Hell’s Kitchen.

The wives run the city now; everyone’s playing by a different set of rules. They change depending on where the wind is blowing and right now it’s a veritable shit storm with forces spinning in centrifugal circles: the Irish are being driven out; the Italians are laying low. Everyone is keeping their head down while the Chinese set up shop and build a spider web of networks running deep to the ground.

It’s the end of the world as Gabriel knows it, the end of cloak and dagger and subterfuge and secret handshakes with ten different signals.

What’s worse is no jobs seem to be forthcoming though that probably has more to do with Gabriel’s freelancing terms: pay 100% upfront, and he gets to back out at any time if he sees fit to do so. 

More than a handful of people have told him to fuck off, but in the end they always come back like the world’s most begrudging boomerangs. Yes, his terms are ridiculous, but he didn’t spend three years in the military for nothing. He didn’t spend three years learning how to walk and talk and how to take point just so he could get lumped in with everybody else, every schmuck with a chip on their shoulder who learned their aim from watching their great uncle shoot milk bottles in the backyard. 

Gabriel’s got nothing to prove; his reputation follows him wherever he goes. But if there’s no job, then there’s no reputation, and because Hell’s Kitchen is getting smaller and smaller with fewer bodies to mourn and bury in this brave new world, because his friends are all in hiding, because Claire is dead, because there’s nothing left for him in New York, Gabriel packs his bags and leaves.

* * *

He goes west. He goes west, because west is the direction of freedom. Actually, first he goes north, a lot of north to get to the tip of Maine, but then west. He ends up, of all places, in Colorado Springs, with his two bags, his shades hooked into his collar, and a pack of smokes in his back pocket, flattened in places where he sat on it during the flight over. 

There’s all sorts of things to be said about suburban life but if there’s one thing to take away it’s this: that acclimation isn’t the hard part, it’s the boredom that eats you alive. This is why people have affairs, Gabriel thinks, they need something to do with all that free time on their hands, a respite from the all consuming bleakness of suburban mediocrity. 

Gabriel has a week to absorb local color. He has money saved up from payouts for small jobs here and there and it’s enough for him to sublease an apartment in a neighborhood that doesn’t perpetually smell like wet garbage and rain. He’s lived in worse conditions, doesn’t give a shit about his living situation to be frank, and this will actually be his first time living in a proper apartment that he doesn’t have to share with anyone else. Not that he can’t ever afford it, just that he hates living alone as he has a tendency to go apeshit. 

All that quiet can’t be good for a man who suffers from bad dreams. 

Gabriel used to live in a dingy little apartment right above a dim sum place in Chinatown, New York. It had uneven flooring and low ceilings and a small window that looked out into the street—perfect by his own standards and it doubled as an opium den. 

It was when the sun went down that the neighborhood came alive. He learned Cantonese from eavesdropping on his neighbors, sitting outside by the fire escape, breathing in woodsmoke wafting from the restaurants that were just starting to open for the night. People filled the streets, greeted each other with loud shouts and there was always someone on a street corner trying to sell you something in their pocket. Gabriel loved it there. He made friends, he made enemies; he remembers it vividly with fondness and with verve. 

Because it didn’t matter where, Hell’s Kitchen, Brooklyn, Harlem, that city used to be his whole life. Now there’s nothing for him out there, just water under the bridge hiding skeletons and ancient history. And the water keeps rising and it’s up to the chest and it’s like every bad dream of his where he can’t remember how to swim. 

And it’s true what they say about home: once you leave, it’s all over. 

* * *

The apartment is a corner one on the second floor of a mid-rise building that’s been painted beige in a mostly failed attempt at a modern makeover. It came with furniture, but none of it matched: a TV, a bed, some cutlery tucked inside the kitchen drawers and a fold-out couch with stains of dinner parties past and other dubious activities. Gabriel has half the mind to torch it but he’s low on funds to procure another couch, at least until the payout for the Murphy job comes through. The previous tenants must have hung pictures or whatever else: there are soft discolorations on the wall in every room. That aside, everything else seems to be in order. His neighbors leave him well alone with the exception of the old lady two doors down who bakes him banana bread three days after he moves in.

The first few weeks pass by in a haze. At night, Gabriel drinks a lot until he feels like he’s going to puke. During the day, he eats cheap food: takeout and cold vegetable soup straight out of the can, everything on the dollar menu, leftover pizza. He goes through two packs of smokes a day, smoking his cigarettes down to the filter until his lungs ache. He doesn’t shower nearly as often as he should; he forgets to shave. 

He makes sure to walk everywhere so he can get a mental grid of the neighborhood stamped into his mind. Probably his paranoia speaking, but he feels more comfortable knowing his surroundings by heart.

Gabriel rides out the waves, and it’s the same old shit day in and day out. He builds a routine and sticks to it, takes care of himself the best he can. The body is important, sacred like a weapon, but Gabriel has a natural predilection for self-destruction when he’s caught in a depressive slump like he is right now. He was raised by a lifelong Catholic and the kind of father that inspired dressing flamboyantly and sleeping with your fists closed at all times— of course he was going to make a terrible adult; it’s in his blood, like a disease. 

But life goes on and on and on like a terrible cassette tape and sooner than later the world shifts.

Weeks pass and no one comes barreling through the door, demanding Gabriel’s head on a pike; the phone stays dead silent and old friends don’t suddenly start crawling out of the woodwork to wait for him in the dark with a vendetta and a loaded gun. 

The world has moved on without him.

The thought is a little disconcerting at first. Blending in has never been this easy. Gabriel could be anybody in this town. Just anybody.

* * *

Gabriel is restless in a matter of weeks. He tries to temper the impulse to do something, which in his line of work often called for a bullet and a gun. It becomes especially hard to stay put when he has nothing to fill his days. He doesn’t have any hobbies, can’t remember the last time he did anything for fun. He used to be great at blackjack, swindling everyone under the table of every last penny. 

He learned card games in the military — Texas Hold ‘Em, Gin Rummy, Poker, _Hearts_ — on top of about twenty other useful life skills one of which was knowing whose cock to suck to gain special favors. So he has the military to thank for his livelihood pretty much and the ache in his shoulder that comes and goes whenever it rains, the remnant of an old shrapnel wound for a bullet he didn’t mean to take. He got a medal for his efforts but who didn’t in the military; they were giving them away like candy, everyone including their mother got one by the time the war was through. 

Then the itch comes back which is par for the course. 

It always comes back, rising to the surface when he’s feeling like this: downtrodden and tired, hollowed out and hating himself. He finds the seediest bar in town: dim and dirty, empty except for two high school age kids drinking beer and playing pool at the bar end of the room; smelling like mildew and old liquor. Gabriel used to hang out in bars like this one in when he didn’t want to be found. This time he’s not sure that’s true anymore. 

He was made to blend in, not to be flashy, because anonymity in his line of work is a first and foremost requirement. Except that he _is _flashy, in a subtle way. On the job, he takes tokens from all his marks: a lock of hair, a wedding band, a plate of still-warm apple pie left cooling on the kitchen counter. Once he took a man’s wallet, emptying it of everything except the two speeding tickets he got in Montana. Gabriel looks at everyone a little too long, long enough to induce discomfort but just as long that he also piques their interest. He knows his proportions well and dresses according to his target demographic. He’s not an idiot; he leaves his buttons undone for the right set of eyes. When he actually puts in the effort, he can be charming as well as suave. 

The bar quickly fills up after dark, a crowd of guys in blue denim shirts and jeans, laughing and being rowdy. Some of them are wearing cowboy boots, scuffed at the heels and clearly broken in. These guys who never left the Midwest, who were slow to speak and sweat-hardened: _hicks_.

Two men approach him that night, both big and dark-haired and obviously wanting to fuck him. Gabriel just quirks his mouth at them, a thanks, but no thanks, type of expression that Gabriel is used to making by now.

But then he’s tempted to take them up on their offer when he remembers the last time he’d gotten laid. The guy blew him in a motel parking lot, bent him over the hood of his truck, used too much lube and spit when he fucked him with their pants pooled around their ankles. Gabriel didn’t have to wait very long because the guy finished in a matter of seconds. He called Gabriel _honey _and Gabriel was tempted more than a few times to punch him in the dick. He didn’t, in the end. Not even when he called Gabriel _cute_. He still regrets it to this day and Gabriel is a man with so few regrets.

But that had been months ago, close to a year, and now Gabriel is aching to get fucked, raring for it in fact and so keyed up he may just get into a fist fight if it meant bruises. He ends up nursing a few more pints.

After, Gabriel makes the short trek back to his apartment alone. He takes all his clothes off except for his boxers. Wrapping a hand around his dick feels strange after so many months of nothing, and it’s even stranger when he starts fucking his limp dick into his fist until his breathing pinches his lungs. His heart throbs sharply, his knees scratch the cheap bedding. Gabriel gives up when his dick refuses to get hard and lies on his back staring at the ceiling. He expects to feel a profound emptiness, but is surprised to find himself awash with overwhelming relief instead. He goes to sleep with his hand still cupping his dick through the waistband of his boxers. In the morning, he pukes his guts into the toilet and it feels like a purge of bad dreams.

* * *

Gabriel has been conditioned since he was eighteen and old enough to join the military to rise with the sun. He can only laze about in bed for so long before he starts to get bored. He’s showered and dressed by seven, washing last night’s dirty dishes by hand at seven thirty, then at eight he’s walking around the neighborhood watching families walk their dogs and children biking up and down the tree-lined street. No one pays him any attention; this isn’t Hell’s Kitchen anymore. 

There’s a bakery down town that opens at nine selling deep fried bread rolls with ham and cheese and meat pies soft as tits. The metal gates of nearby stores start to open one after the other as people emerge from their buildings. The pawnshop first, then the family salon, then the meat shop. Gabriel buys coffee at a nearby diner and eats a breakfast of dry toast, fried beans and eggs. He cracks his toast in two, dipping the corner into ketchup and a soupy mixture of egg runoff and fried beans. 

It’s a warm day for August but by midday, a cool breeze takes the brunt of the humidity. Around the same time, he comes upon an outdoor market selling everything from pickled vegetables to homemade jam in quaint little jars covered in gingham-patterned lids, slabs of silver fish on large blocks of ice. The man cleaning and scaling the fish keeps a bucket full of bloody fish guts at his feet and he hums a tune as he scales a large sea bass with quick, efficient strokes of his knife.

Gabriel is impressed, but has half the mind to show him a technique that can keep things neat and tidy. Just a flick of the wrist there, a quick and clean glide through soft sinewy muscle. The man flicks him a long look at as soon as he approaches and it’s not a friendly one at all so Gabriel just goes on his way, head ducked down. He flashes the man a soft smile as he leaves. 

* * *

He’s back at Larry’s that same night. That’s what the bar is called, or at least that’s the barkeep’s name anyway. From Gabriel’s understanding, he’s the only one there who isn’t a regular, even the high school kids are longstanding customers, allowed to drink their apple ciders and smoke their cigarettes as long as they don’t cause too much trouble. Larry probably has their parents on speed dial anyway.

Gabriel orders a scotch, neat. He swirls his glass around, sniffing it curiously, before proceeding to down the rest of the drink all at once. It goes down with a burn that has him coughing a few times. He orders another scotch, then another, then his fourth, sixth, he loses count. It’s late when he stumbles into the men’s room, bumping into everything and needing to rely on the wall for balance. He pisses in one of the urinals, stands there with his fly open and his dick in one hand while he braces himself against the grimy tile, forehead-first. It smells like mildew and bleach. His eyes can’t seem to focus on anything; the tiles sway and swim though that could just be his rapidly deteriorating sense of balance.

Gabriel finishes his business but then must have blipped out for a second or something because when he looks up, there’s a guy in the next urinal over. He opens his eyes, and the bathroom is overly yellow and saturated. He tries to blink his vision back to normal. Big, dark hair, with a baseball cap obscuring most of his face, flannel fucking shirt. _Jesus_, he thinks not without a hint of disbelief. But what really has Gabriel’s attention is this guy’s dick. It’s massive, like something out of a porno or his filthiest west dream. 

Gabriel huffs. If he didn’t like getting it up the ass so much he’d be the type to get jealous. As it stands, he’s a decorated queer, and you don’t come by dicks like that very often, cut or uncut. It’s a thing of beauty, a marvel of human anatomy. On day one God created _this_ guy for other guys like Gabriel to feel inferior or else line up with their asses in the air.

“I’d suck you off for free,” Gabriel offers, really just bullshitting around, hoping the guy recognizes it for what it is: his ticket out if this is not his kind of thing. Most people tend to be receptive of Gabriel’s advances, but some people need to reach a level of inebriation first before taking him up on his offer.

Gabriel flicks his eyes up, and the guy returns his gaze with a measure of disbelief and confusion. He can’t make out any of his features in the dark what with that fucking baseball cap on, but the guy’s nose seems to be his most striking feature. Gabriel’s grandma had a thing about noses, says strong ones mirror a person’s character. Big nose, big dick, though Gabriel guesses she probably had something a little more philosophical in mind.

“What?” the guy says, probably for the fifth time.

Gabriel shrugs, zips himself up clumsily, and when it’s clear this is going nowhere fast, excuses himself from the conversation. He grabs his jacket from the booth, shrugs the left sleeve on but can’t seem to do the same with the other. Doesn’t bother him at all but he should probably call it a night if he can’t even put his jacket back on straight. Straight. He laughs, because it’s a funny joke.

“Hey!” says Larry from behind the bar. “Hey, you didn’t pay for your drinks!”

“Put it on my tab,” Gabriel tells him flippantly, cupping his back pocket for a smoke and grinning triumphantly when he finds one. 

“What tab?” Larry says. “Hey! Come back!”

The night air licks Gabriel’s face when he steps outside. He takes a deep lungful of it before pulling out his lighter, the same one he’d nicked from a bodega in Harlem with a fading sticker of a glazed donut that he often scratched with a thumbnail. He drops the lighter the first few times but manages to light his cigarette on the sixth attempt. Gabriel blows smoke rings into the air, waiting for the nicotine to kickstart all his senses which have been dulled by hours of drinking numbing alcohol.

“Hey,” someone says behind him. “Hey, you need to pay up, man.”

Gabriel turns, and it’s the guy from the bathroom. The one with the big dick. Streetlight is kind to him; he’s handsome when the room isn’t dark to hide it. And he’s bigger too, Gabriel appreciates that. He’s exactly _his_ type. Those soft Bambi eyes can get anyone in trouble, and because Gabriel has a penchant for trouble—_well_.

“Oh,” Gabriel says. “It’s you.” He doesn’t bother hiding his glee. 

“You didn’t pay your tab,” the guy says. 

“What are you gonna do?” Gabriel says. “Arrest me?”

“Look,” the guy starts, but is effectively cut off when more of his pals emerge from behind him, like they’ve been waiting this whole time to make a dramatic entrance because they’re all part of a musical number. 

They outnumber him five to one, which is just peachy fucking keen.

Gabriel barely has time to react before getting punched in the face. Physical violence is nothing new to him, he’s taken harder hits before, but the punch comes at a weird angle that offsets his center of balance and he tips to the side. Then there’s a secondary knock to his skull on his way down and the world turns suddenly shaky and dark. The last thing he remembers is rolling over and using the guy’s foot as a pillow. Gabriel grins up at him before spitting out blood on the pavement. In the shadows, it looks like a dark ink blot.

* * *

Gabriel wakes in a dark room with a damp, cool cloth across his eyes and forehead. He’s not in his apartment, that becomes apparent when he sits up and takes stock of his environment: on the bedside table in a neat little pile are his wallet, switchblade, and gun. He doesn’t feel panicked or threatened which is often the case when he wakes up in a room he doesn’t recognize. 

Next to his wallet is an unopened bottle of water and two aspirin pills. He remembers getting hit in the face, but his nose doesn’t hurt when he prods it with his fingertips. The blood’s been cleaned away; the room smells faintly of rubbing alcohol.

The clock on the nightstand flashes seven fifteen in the morning. Gabriel can hear birds outside instead of the hum of traffic that usually accompanies the hour. He checks his clothes; the only thing he’s missing are his shoes which he can’t seem to find anywhere else in the room, not under the bed or next to the closet. He grabs his stuff, pockets his knife and gun, laments the loss of his lighter and pack of smokes as he wends his way down the hall. At the end of it is a living room, neater than Gabriel’s and a lot more spacious, with the usual living room knick knacks: a worn leather couch soft with indentions, a TV and fireplace, a coffee table littered with stacks of bills and auto magazines. That’s where Gabriel finds his lighter, sitting next to an ornate jade ashtray filled with still-smoldering cigarettes. 

There’s a crackle of music coming from the kitchen: someone in there humming along off-key to _Kansas_. A cabinet door opens and shuts. The smell of breakfast cooking seems to becoming from that general direction, strong whiffs of pepper and onion and bacon grease. Gabriel guesses eggs too and hopes there’s also coffee because he feels like absolute shit. 

He doesn’t have any shoes on so his feet don’t make a sound when he creeps into the kitchen only to find the guy from the bathroom last night pouring himself a glass of orange juice. He’s wearing a robe and like Gabriel is completely barefoot. His t-shirt is all stretched out at the neck, the print long faded and indiscernible.

They stare at each for a beat before the guy sets his glass down and grabs a chipped mug from the shelf above the sink. Interestingly, it has the CSPPA logo on it. Colorado Springs Police Protective Association. Huh.

“Morning,” the guy says, handing him the mug, now filled with hot black coffee. “How’s the uh—” he gestures to Gabriel’s face wordlessly.

Gabriel winces, touching his cheek in a fit of self-consciousness. It feels bruised like a fruit, still warm. Other than the raging headache, he feels fine. Absolutely fine. Relaxed even but not drugged which is something novel.

“Didn’t peg you for a good samaritan,” he says after taking his first sip of coffee. It’s the strong stuff, no sugar or cream just how he likes, hits the spot like a shot of adrenaline. He eyes the guy up and down. Bits of his hair are sticking out every which way; he looks like he just spent the night on the couch, his eyes still sleepy and his cheek creased with pillow marks.

Gabriel tries not to get a hard on, wonders vaguely if the condom in his wallet has already expired. Even if it has, he’ll still fuck this guy. He has the kind of captivating energy that reminds Gabriel of conmen: something dark and dangerous lurking underneath. He’s perfect.

“Well, you’re all right now, so no harm right?”

Gabriel shrugs. “Who do I have to thank for the black eye, mm? Those guys your friends or something?”

“No, they’re— it’s, it’s real complicated,” the guy says, rubbing his forehead like he’s staving off a headache. “People around these parts, they’re like family to each other; they protect their own. When you disrespect family, you disrespect them.”

Gabriel rolls his eyes. He’s entered the boonies, apparently, but he gets what the guy is saying. He worked for guys like that, killing their enemies for them when they were too chicken shit to do it.

“I told good old Larry to put it on my tab so I don’t see what the problem is. I pay my debts, it’s not like I wasn’t coming back again the next day to get shitfaced. I’ve been there three, four times. He should know me by now.”

It’s clear the guy doesn’t believe him. “You’re not from around here, are you?” he says.

“What gave that away, was it the hair or the accent?”

“Where you from?”

“You mean originally or what.”

The guy gives him a look that says he doesn’t really care either way; he’s just making conversation, the least Gabriel can do is give him an honest answer.

Gabriel takes a seat at the kitchen table instead. No point letting the nice breakfast spread go to waste and those slices of bacon look extra crispy. The guy remains standing, leaning against the kitchen counter, watching him. 

“Born in Ireland, raised in the Bronx,” Gabriel says, pointing a slice of bacon at the guy before stuffing all of it in his mouth. He washes it down with coffee. It’s amazing what a few swallows of caffeine can do. He feels vastly improved immediately, less likely to reach for the gun tucked away in his waistband.

“Flip,” the guy says.

“What?” 

“Name’s Flip.”

“Right,” Gabriel says, waiting till his coffee is refilled before responding. “That short for something?”

Flip doesn’t respond. 

“Gabriel,” Gabriel tells him, once the silence has dragged on long enough. 

“No last name?”

“Can’t have you pinning any crimes on me. I like to keep an air of mystery,” Gabriel says, still keeping with the playful tone. “What’s the matter, you a cop or something?” He drops his voice to a sultry purr but Flip doesn’t rise to the bait. Boring. He’s the worst tease ever. Gabriel has had men the size of him eating out of the palm of his hand before lunch but it looks like it’ll take more than a few well-placed innuendos to get Flip to break. 

“Never been to New York,” Flip muses out loud.

“Trust me,” Gabriel says, remembering all that has changed since coming to and leaving New York. “You’re not missing out.”

Between the two of them, they decimate breakfast entirely which consists of bacon and four eggs and a plateful of buttery toast. Gabriel gets up to leave after offering to help Flip with the dishes purely out of a sense of gratitude and not a sudden sweep of altruism. Flip doesn’t let him which means Gabriel spends three uninterrupted minutes ogling him from the back: his strong shoulders, his sculpted ass, the soft dark waves of his hair. The military gait is unmistakable though Flip keeps trying to slouch occasionally, making himself intentionally smaller to fit the cramped space of his kitchen as he wipes his hands on a damp dishrag.

When the last of the plates have been put away, Gabriel asks, “You wanna tell me where you hid my shoes?”

“I washed them,” Flip says, glancing at Gabriel over his shoulder with raised eyebrows. “They’re in the bathroom. You don’t remember what happened last night, do you?”

Gabriel is drawing a blank which is troubling but the least of his priorities right now. He remembers getting the shit beat out of, but other than that: nothing. Waking up in Flip’s bed was just as surprising as not waking up on the streets with his wallet missing and his teeth capped in. He shrugs at Flip in answer. 

Flip quirks his lips at him in the ghost of a smile before leading him to the bathroom where sure enough, his shoes are hanging from the shower railing, dripping lines of water on the tile. That’s expensive Italian leather, stolen from one of his marks, someone’s bastard son Gabriel had been paid to keep quiet. Gabriel cocks his head at Flip, so many things left unsaid. 

“You got puke on them,” Flip explains, like he’s already heard the question before Gabriel even has the opportunity to voice it. “And then on me _and _then my car. You couldn’t remember where you lived so I took you here to get you sorted. It wasn’t even funny how out of it you were. Had half the mind to drop you off at the police station but. You look like you’d just cause more trouble there.”

“Jesus, I’m a menace, aren’t I,” Gabriel says because what else is there left to say. That sounds exactly like him when he’d been younger and more careless, less mistrustful of the goodwill of strangers. Now he knows better to question everything: never take things at face value because there’s always something that people are gonna want to take from you. Gabriel doesn’t have a lot of friends but his line of work doesn’t exactly lend itself well to a lot of socialization outside of shady business deals. Today’s friend can be tomorrow’s job. He’s had that happen before and things got real awkward.

Gabriel gestures awkwardly to the two of them, the universal sign for hanky panky. “We didn’t — we didn’t fuck, did we?”

Flip looks at him flatly but there’s a spot of color in his face and his ears. He takes Gabriel’s shoes from the railing and all but shoves them into his chest. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

“What,” Gabriel starts laughing. “That was a perfectly reasonable question.” 

“We didn’t,” Flip tells him, still with the same unreadable expression, the one that keeps Gabriel grinning like a shark. “Don’t flatter yourself.” He gives Gabriel a once over, eyes flicking upwards in long, slow appraisal. “You’re not my type.”

“So you fuck men, then,” Gabriel hedges.

“I’m afraid that information’s highly classified.”

“You know what else is highly classified—”

Flip pins him against the door— or doesn’t pin him but it feels like that anyway. What he actually does is step forward and invade Gabriel’s personal space until Gabriel backs up against the door with his breathing all heavy and his eyelids even heavier. Up close, Flip smells clean like after shave, a hint of coffee on his breath. 

“Go home, Gabriel,” Flip says, and something in the way he says it makes Gabriel’s spine sing. It’s been so long since he’s gotten fucked, he’s desperate for anything at this point, even a punch. “Take a shower, you smell like shit. Get your face looked at, maybe. Then maybe we can talk.”

“So all it takes is a shower, huh? A little powdering up?”

“And maybe pay Larry back what you owe.” He raises his eyebrows at Gabriel and Gabriel feels a little bit sheepish, like a scolded child. He nods and Flip grunts in silent acknowledgement. And that’s the end of that.

Gabriel leaves because it’s obvious he wouldn’t be getting any more out of Flip, not even a blowjob, and he cradles his shoes in his arms as he walks to the bus stop barefooted. He gets some strange looks on the way which he returns with a grin and a wry two-fingered salute. 

It’s only later when he’s back in his apartment, freshly showered and lying flat on his bed, that Gabriel thinks to check his gun. Then he huffs at himself when it hits him: bastard took all the bullets out.

* * *

It’s a small town where everyone knows everyone so Gabriel takes Flip’s advice and pays his fucking tab. Easier to nip it in the bud straight away lest he makes enemies he doesn’t need. Clean slate and all that and he’s starting to get into the swing of things by sleeping with his back to the door.

It’s early the next day when he decides to make the short trip to Larry’s. Luckily, it’s just a few bus stops away from his apartment. He’d found it by accident, and on foot, when he was itching to get out of his apartment, so the short bus ride takes him by surprise.

The bus takes him all the way downtown, and he pulls the stop cord when the bar starts looming close. There it is, Larry’s spelled out in loopy letters with the ‘y’ coiled like a lasso. As soon as Gabriel hops off the bus, the last of the blinds get rolled up and a sign on the door is flipped from ‘CLOSED’ to ‘OPEN’. 

He’s never seen the bar in broad daylight before. Probably it should stay that way but it’s too late now. The place is a shithole at night but it’s even worse during the day without the darkness to hide the myriad beer stains on the sticky linoleum floor and the decade’s worth of graffiti taking up most of the far wall. 

When Gabriel seats himself at the counter, a man he doesn’t recognize walks up to him. He’s wearing an apron and sporting a thick goatee. He doesn’t say anything but the fact he’s holding an order pad expectantly makes Gabriel want to punch him in the face. Some people bring out the worse in you and goatee here is one of the lucky ones. 

“I’m here to pay my tab,” Gabriel says, then when no response seems to be forthcoming repeats his statement with a little more emphasis. “Look,” he says, frustrated, “Just tell me how much I owe you so I don’t get the tar kicked out of me when I come back here.”

Goatee just stares at him. Frankly, Gabriel is getting tired of it. He pulls out a couple twenties from his wallet but then Goatee turns and disappears to the back room behind the beaded curtain. 

“Pops! Someone wants to pay their tab!”

Larry comes bustling out a minute later, hairnet covering his toupee. In the light of day, he looks more his age: the lines of his face are deeper and more pronounced, his blue eyes watery, the skin around them gaunt from little sleep. He reminds Gabriel of his own granddad who took him fishing when he was six and then drowned in the river the next day after falling in after one too many. His body was never found. Two weeks later, Gabriel’s family made preparations to move to America.

“Sorry about that,” Larry says, glancing at Goatee with a long-suffering sigh, “My grandson, he’s an absolute — oh it’s you.”

“Yeah,” Gabriel says. “It’s me.” Larry eyes the wad of bills in his hand before reaching for something under the counter, just out of Gabriel’s line of sight. 

For a half second, Gabriel tenses, sure Larry is about to pull a gun on him. Wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to, after all. When he pulls out some kind of battered record book instead, Gabriel allows himself to relax and uncurls his hand from the handle of his gun. A soft thud has him snapping back to attention. Larry unfurls his record book, licking his thumb as he flips through its water-stained pages. He taps a page marked “Red” at the very top. Probably that’s a reference to Gabriel’s hair; even as a kid it always made him stand out. It was the first thing he got rid of when he enlisted, sheared it off clean as per regulation. 

Larry taps the page before circling Gabriel’s total balance with a ballpoint pen.

So he did open a tab after all, Gabriel thinks. Problem is, he doesn’t even remember drinking half of whatever’s on that list last night.

“You sure you’re not pulling my leg here, Larry?”

“Been running this business for decades, kid. Do I look like I’m pulling your leg?”

Gabriel grins, pays what he owes, becoming increasingly aware of the fact more money is coming out of his wallet than in when he stuffs it back in his pocket leagues lighter than moments earlier. He’s still waiting for the payout for the Murphy job. First time in a long time he didn’t ask for 100% payment upfront and _this _happens. Just his luck. He orders a coffee and a plate of beans on toast since it’s almost lunch time anyway. A few people start coming in, friendly faces he doesn’t recognize: a couple who keeps mostly to themselves in a corner booth, a few oldies, then some guys ordering lunch to go to bring to work. One of them is wearing a bus driver’s uniform. 

Gabriel hums along to the song playing on the jukebox, glancing up at the lopsided HELP WANTED sign Goatee tapes above the bar. 

“You hiring?” he asks.

Goatee shrugs.

It’s Larry who answers, stopping in the act of wiping glasses to give him the most disbelieving look.

“That depends,” he says, crossing his arms, “Can you take instructions?”

Gabriel can, is terrific at it in fact, because he works better when he’s taking orders and when there’s someone looking at the big picture so he can focus on the little details of his job. He’s not a leader; that’s why he flourished in the military, and why when he was discharged for bad conduct which is a fancy way of saying he got caught sucking dick one too many times, it was easy for Little Jackie to take him under his wing. It wasn’t even a question of money; Gabriel enjoyed being his lackey, getting his hands dirty and keeping his secrets. It worked for a while, then Little Jackie got greedy. 

“I can cook, I can clean, I’m handy with a knife…” Gabriel rattles off his skills like he’s on a spelling bee where speed counts. “I can mix cocktails, I used to work as a plumber _and_ customers love me.”

Larry doesn’t look like he believes that last bit for a second but he hands him a mop anyway that he procures from seemingly out of nowhere. Gabriel takes one last deep drag of his cigarette before stubbing it in an ashtray on the counter. 

“Does this mean I’m hired, Larry?” he grins. 

Larry shakes his head, clucking his tongue as he files half a dozen glasses in a neat little row above the bar. “It’s just temporary. I just happen to need my toilets cleaned. Now get! Before I change my mind.” He jerks his head towards the general direction of the bathroom impatiently.

Laughing, Gabriel gets to work.

* * *

It’s not the best job in the world, but Gabriel’s not very picky and at least he’s not bagging shit at a grocery chain. Gabriel can’t remember the last time he did an honest day’s work. Must have been a long time ago, before he enlisted. He remembers being a busboy, then driving a cab for a whole month after he was discharged. 

It’s only temporary, Larry says, and Gabriel is fine with that mostly because he’s only doing it anyway until his money comes through, then he’ll hightail it out of there and try to figure stuff out. He needs money, but at the same time, the more pressing issue is that he needs something to occupy his time. Civilian life is boring, only manageable in short stretches and he can feel his sanity wearing thin day after day after day. He’s not made for civilian life. He gets bored easily. And when he gets bored, bad things happen, his good senses take a backseat as he lets his id take the wheel. 

Gabriel’s gone to Church a few times just so his Sundays aren’t pervasively empty, though nothing beats listening to sermons in Latin when you can’t understand a word of it.

Gabriel shows up to work every weekday, precisely at 11 AM on the dot to help with the lunch rush, then he goes home for a few hours after three to get some sleep before returning late in the afternoon to help with whatever task Larry sees fit to give him: hauling crates of liquor when his supplier makes a delivery, counting sacks of flour, fixing the dishwasher and sink, then the usual mopping up vomit from the floor and taking orders from customers rigmarole. It’s easy work but tiring, and though Gabriel can do it with his eyes closed, there’s always something that keeps him on his toes and keeps him from working on autopilot.

Larry lets him cook sometimes, just simple stuff like grilled cheese sandwiches and French omelettes, his tasks relegated to the back of the house like the kitchen or the bathroom. It’s clumsy at first, food spills everywhere, utensils get lost in the soapy water, but Gabriel starts to build up a rhythm and then he can stop thinking about it and just do it naturally. 

Most days, he wakes up sore and a little cranky. He balls his hand into a fist, then flexes it down and stretches his arm out, feeling the burn of muscles on his forearm. To be honest, he feels like shit. 

Still, he goes to work an hour later.

* * *

Of course, the pay is shit, but Gabriel knew that coming in. He’s not doing it for the money. If he wanted money, he would call up old friends, those who didn’t die in the crossfire after the wives took over Hell’s Kitchen, and ask about news of a job. There were people still willing to hire him because they knew how he conducted business: fast and efficient with nothing tying him to the body. If you wanted someone to disappear, he was your guy. A quick in and out. 

People say guys like him can’t be trusted but that’s not true at all. If he wanted repeat business, he had to be trustworthy; no one wants to go to jail because their hired gun sold them out or did shoddy work or talked to the wrong person. His work had to be rock solid and speak for itself. Killing people for a living isn’t easy nor is it for the faint of heart: it’s a business with a whole chain of supply and demand. You gotta deliver every single time: same quality of service no matter who you were working for. Because people _will_ talk, and when people talk about nothing but good things other people will want to hire you for shady deeds they don’t tell their mistresses about. 

The only part about this new job that Gabriel likes is that he gets to people-watch like the old days when Larry needs a hand tending bar and Emmett (Goatee) can’t be assed to show up. It’s interesting to see the variety of people trickling in after nine, these guys working at the nearby factories needing respite from their wives. Men in denim overalls and trucker hats crooning to John Denver playing softly on the jukebox. Half of the customer populace has been coming here for years which Gabriel finds rather quaint. A business that has so many regulars means you’re doing something right though Gabriel can’t speak for the quality of the food at Larry’s nor the ambience and even its amenities. 

The first few times he gets an order wrong, he’s met with strong complaints and glances sliding over to Larry, followed by scathing allusions to his competence. Now people see him at the bar and offer awkward nods before shuffling over to their preferred booths. The one thing Gabriel isn’t is a pushover. The other thing he isn’t is in possession of good bedside manner but it’s best not to let Larry in on the fact. 

And then of course on Saturday nights, Flip and his buddies show up like clockwork. Gabriel gets a kick out of watching them, like school boys in a playground, comparing dicks. They crowd the billiard table, talking boisterously amongst themselves, laughing and punching each other on the shoulder in testosterone sweat. The usual stuff: general complaints about work, their wives, how inflation is fucking with the everyman. Gentrification. _Huh._ They seem to hate black people with a vengeance and don’t care who hears about them talking about it. 

Gabriel has always been a good reader of people, which is a skill born of years in the military and also his line of work: following his marks around, studying their little habits and quirks, knowing at which point of the day they’ll be alone. He observes Flip interacting with his buddies and it’s interesting how unassuming he forces himself to become. He’s a big guy, towering above most of them, but his movements are restrained, calculated, smiling at all the right intervals, saying the right things to incite a particular reaction. The Felix guy — fox-faced and never tips — hates him and Gabriel can see it in his eyes, the simmering hate, but the other two eat up his bullshit like it’s fried gold.

The even funnier part is, they call him by a different name. They call him Ron.

* * *

Gabriel takes several smoke breaks whenever there’s a lull in business. It always winds down after 10 o’clock when the only people still at the bar are those who don’t have anywhere to be for the rest of the night or simply refuse to go home; they’ve settled in with their drinks, don’t care to be bothered or bother others, which means Gabriel is free to leave the bar to Emmett while he smokes in the alleyway between Larry’s and the next door building, kicking empty cans and watching cats fight over bis of trash. He’s minding his own business when he sees Flip at the end of the alley, hands patting his pockets. The building lights have dimmed this time of the night but Gabriel can still clearly make out the patterns of his shirt: doesn’t he have anything else to wear? How much mileage can he get out of that shirt? Gabriel huffs out a laugh.

“Hey!” he calls out before he can stop himself. He whistles to get Flip’s attention. “Hey!” he repeats.

Flip’s head snaps back up.

Gabriel wordlessly holds up his lighter, flicking the wheel with a metallic noise. “Need a light?”

Flip may be too far away for Gabriel to be able to make out the expression on his face but Gabriel likes to think it’s one of amusement. Flip ambles towards him with the slow gait of the unhurried and couldn’t be bothered. He stops just a couple of feet away so Gabriel takes it upon himself to close the distance between them. He flicks his lighter on and Flip meets his level gaze silently before being the first one to pull away.

Flip inhales and breathes out cigarette smoke, gesturing to Gabriel with his chin. “You work here now or something?”

“Or something,” Gabriel replies with a shrug.

“Didn’t think I’d see you again.”

“I’d say your friends probably thought the same,” Gabriel grins. He kicks at a stray bit of trash, watching it cartwheel across the street in silence.

“What are you doing here?” Flip finally asks, after watching him from the corner of his eye.

“Larry needed an extra set of hands so he hired me.” Gabriel stubs his first cigarette on the wall behind him before lighting a second one and letting it bob between his lips as he speaks. “I’m good at mixing drinks. I’m Irish, you know. Pure-blooded. Well that’s not true, my ma’s from Yorkshire. But my dad was a raging alcoholic so I know a thing or two about liquor. You questioning my qualifications, _Ron_?”

Flip clearly isn’t expecting that. His head whips around so fast it’s a wonder his head doesn’t fall off his shoulders. His eyes narrow, his shoulders uncurl. For the first time since their conversation started, he stands to his full height and stops slouching. There: that’s better. It feels like Gabriel is finally talking to an actual person and not a clever imitation of one. He’s a liar and a thief first and foremost, so he knows a thing or two about deception. 

Flip may think he’s fooling everybody, with that aww shucks bashfulness and macho bravado he likes to put on but not Gabriel. He can smell bullshit from a mile away. Liars have the ability to recognize each other. Gabriel once went out with a hired gun like himself and never even knew their real name even years after they died. The whole relationship was purely physical, but it would have been nice to know he was visiting the right grave and not somebody else’s like an idiot. 

“You plan on giving me back my bullets any time soon,” Gabriel asks.

Flip gives him a long look before responding, the kind of look that makes a shiver zip through Gabriel’s belly like a blade. “You carry a license for that firearm?”

“Sure,” Gabriel smiles, all teeth. It’s the same one he gives marks before pouncing. “Would you like to see it? It’s in my apartment underneath my mattress. I could show you if you like.”

Flip doesn’t smile completely. He doesn’t give smiles away so freely, Gabriel notices that about him. He also is unflinchingly unflappably _cool_. He’s met people like that before, and everyone has their breaking point. He can’t help but wonder what Flip’s is.

Gabriel has been watching him for the past couple of weeks and nothing seems to take him by surprise: not even Felix’s outrageous posturing. He takes everything in stride. Gabriel wonders if he even blinks. 

Flip blinks. Gabriel chuckles to himself, flicking his cigarette and crushing it on the ground with the heel of his shoe. 

“What time do you get off work?”

Gabriel turns, keeps the door ajar with his leg. He raises his eyebrows at Flip, a silent question in his eyes that Flip doesn’t even have the decency to answer. Have it his way then. Gabriel just rolls his eyes and shrugs. 

“I get off at midnight,” he says, throwing Flip a pointed look over his shoulder. 

Flip doesn’t say anything. 

Gabriel leaves it at that and shuts the door behind him.

* * *

Midnight, later:

“Need a ride home?” is the first thing Flip says, rolling down the passenger side window as his car coasts alongside Gabriel on the street. Flip peers at him through the dark with an inscrutable expression, but the effect is marred when the car rolls over a speed bump and he hits his head on the ceiling and yowls. “Shit!” he hisses, rubbing at the spot and slamming on the brakes.

Gabriel doesn’t bother stifling his laughter and in fact, turns around to face Flip fully. He tucks his hands inside the pockets of his jeans. Nights in Colorado Springs are cooler, the chill unforgivably cutting like the whole city has been suddenly dipped in a tank of liquid nitrogen. He regrets not bringing his jacket to work; Gabriel can feel the tiny hairs on the back of his arms standing up. He could use a drink to warm him up, maybe two. Ever since he started working for Larry, it never occurred to him to drink on the job, mostly because he didn’t want everything enveloped in a muggy sepia haze. He stumbled through his first month after the move half-asleep like the dead; he didn’t want to get used to it. 

“You know,” Gabriel says conversationally, “I was gonna take the bus but if you’re offering to give me a ride then I guess I’m a lucky boy tonight.”

Flip just shakes his head. You think some people would be more appreciative of returned advances. Not Flip apparently. It’ll take blood to be drawn from a stone to impress him. 

“Well hop in,” Flip says, as if it wasn’t his idea in the first place. The back seat is littered with all sorts of junk: wrappers of fast food and a grey duffel bag bursting with sweats and a pair of running shoes. Gabriel clips on his seatbelt like a dutiful citizen, reminding himself his life of crime and law-breaking is over. Well, mostly anyway. He still hasn’t paid his taxes and isn’t about to start now.

Flip is quiet though throughout the drive. This shouldn’t be a surprise as Flip is not an overly chatty person if he isn’t required to be, at least from what Gabriel can glean from his many interactions with his buddies from the bar. He doesn’t make any effort to make small talk either; he mostly just drives with his gaze straight ahead of him after Gabriel gives him shitty directions to his apartment.

“Should you even be driving after drinking all night?” Gabriel asks, above the grating screech of country music. 

Flip grunts. “I’m sober. Just had one beer.”

Funny but Gabriel never noticed that though now that he thinks about it maybe Flip isn’t lying; he’d never seen him let go of that first bottle, can’t ever remember him drinking a second or a third.

“You want something to drink?” Gabriel asks as soon as they arrive at his apartment, shithole that it is. He hasn’t had the time to spruce the place up after starting his job at Larry’s. Takeout boxes are piled in one corner of the kitchen sink and the couch is buried under a mountain of unfolded laundry. Such is the life of a bachelor. Claire used to call him a slob though she said it with such affection while they were still living together. His heart clenches at the memory. What kills him the most out of everything he remembers about her — the smell of her hair, her laugh, how she liked to fuck with the lights off — is the memory of her kindness; he wanted to save her. Life dealt her a shitty hand and he thought he was doing a good thing by coming back. Well, as the English say, fat lot of good that did. He should have stayed put and laid low, not come running back after a two minute phone call from Ruby O’Carroll promising him things were gonna be different this time. 

“You have any coffee?” Flip asks, drawing him out of his thoughts. 

“Coffee?” Gabriel repeats, glancing up, turning around to check on Flip who’s eyeing Gabriel’s little succulent sitting on the windowsill in sympathy. That was another thing that came with the apartment. Gabriel has been trying valiantly to keep it alive but it’ll only be a matter of days before it succumbs to its death. Everything he touches has the tendency to die and this is not him being maudlin but a general observation, a fact of life. He was named after the archangel, the man in linen from the book of Ezekiel who appeared in dreams with prophecies from the Lord. Now people can only pray they don’t see his shadow in their doorway. He used to make bets with himself, keeping score on how many people he’s killed, how many people he’s fucked and fucked over. 

He looks at Flip and wonders if he possesses enough self-awareness to realize he’s just invited himself into the den of a deranged criminal. Probably not, bending down at the waist like that to poke at Gabriel’s succulent and then casting his gaze around the rest of the living room. There’s nothing more to look at unfortunately except the dirty curtains and the busted TV Gabriel bought at a secondhand store after the one that came with the apartment stopped working.

Gabriel makes them both coffee in the kitchen, returning with mismatched mugs in his hands that he had to quickly wash in the sink moments earlier. It’s not everyday he has visitors. Frankly, he prefers it that way. He sleeps more comfortably, doesn’t have to keep checking and re-checking the locks on all his doors and windows.

Flip accepts the proffered mug, but as he does, their fingers touch. It’ll be a cliche to say that Gabriel’s stomach does a little flip at that, and it doesn’t, but what happens instead is he feels a frisson of — fear? Desire? Trepidation? Maybe all three. For the first time in a long time Gabriel is hungry.

They stand there drinking their coffee, not talking. Gabriel made his too sweet, distracted by Flip moving around in his living room. He has another gun tucked under the couch cushions, a sockful of money under the loose floorboard by the TV because he doesn’t believe in bank accounts. If Flip found any of those then he’ll have some explaining to do and Gabriel isn’t the mood for conversation when all he wants it to handcuff Flip to the bed and ride him till he’s half-bred.

It’s clear they’re headed that route anyway so he doesn’t see the point in the frivolity of small talk. Flip is obviously trying to broach the subject, glancing at him with intent in his eyes before looking away. 

“Can we just get this over with?” Gabriel asks impatiently. “Are we gonna fuck or what?”

If he sounds really testy that’s because he is: he hasn’t gotten laid in a long while, and the last time he’d gotten fucked had been even longer ago. Gabriel loves women as well as men but when he’s feeling unhinged and out of control, he needs a big cock to sit on to ground him back to reality. It’s not therapy, but it’s the closest he’ll ever get to it. He likes the surrender of sex, the slow summer burn of getting pummeled till your guts are all but rearranged and you’re a drooling mindless mess on the pillow, filthy everywhere. He doesn’t have to think, or do much of anything else. 

Then Flip does that thing again where he stares at Gabriel without a word and it drives him crazy.

Gabriel shrugs his shirt off, then twists out of the tank top underneath. There he is, standing shirtless in the living room, his arms pebbling with goosebumps, his nipples and his dick hard, and still Flip does nothing.

Then finally he moves, setting his coffee down on the coffee table, giving himself an eyeful of all that Gabriel is offering on the table. _Yeah, look your fill buddy_, he thinks, _last chance you’re gonna get._

“You look good,” Flip says, the same unreadable tone as ever that sends goosebumps skittering across the back of Gabriel’s arms anyway. He rubs the back of his neck to get rid of the shivers. 

“We don’t need to talk,” Gabriel tells him, hand already tugging at his own belt. “Let’s just fuck, all right?”

“All right,” Flip responds, clearly amused. “Let’s do that.” He shakes his head, still chuckling then starts methodically stripping off his clothes: shirt, undershirt, belt then his pants which he steps out of and kicks aside. 

Gabriel resists the urge to stare too long. He’s fucked around with big men before but the thing about Flip is he’s even bigger: his clothes hide his body which is broad muscle and sinew. He clearly takes care of himself because his chest is a steady hull. His thighs look strong and he’s got the kind of hands Gabriel can get used to, the kind he wouldn’t mind feeling him up underneath his clothes. 

There are two kinds of hands, Gabriel knows from his grandma. Hands that build and hands that destroy and looking at Flip’s Gabriel knows just the kind he has.

“C’mere,” Gabriel beckons, and Flip is on him all at once, no further prompting needed. He topples onto Gabriel like a deck of cards, hands flying to his waist and then kissing him. Gabriel doesn’t kiss many people because it does nothing for him during sex so the action takes him a little off guard and and he jerks his head to the side to avoid the awkward collision with Flip’s face. 

Flip pulls back in surprise when he gets a mouthful of jaw and Gabriel shrugs and laughs at him, sliding his palm between them to cup Flip’s erection through his boxers, take that hurt look off his face which has no right making Gabriel feel like the asshole in this situation. “You didn’t say there was gonna be kissing. Next time warn a guy will you?”

Then he squeezes his hand inside Flip’s boxers and Flip groans, tilting his head back, mission accomplished. Gabriel grins at him, eyes-half lidded. He can feel the shape of Flip in his palm, can’t even close his fingers properly around his dick from how big he is. He can’t wait to have it inside him. He wants to be used, bruised up and filthy and he says just as much, pulling his hand out from Flip’s boxers so he could lick precome off his palm.

“So you’re a grower _and _a shower, huh?”

“I thought you said no talking?” Flip reminds him and Gabriel laughs when Flip grabs him by the belt loops and kisses him again. 

This time Gabriel is prepared to take it, so he accepts the kiss with a roll of his eyes as he twists around and starts walking them backwards to the bedroom. Flip kisses with a lot of tongue, taking everything and conceding nothing. It’s like he was raised by Benedictine nuns and was just experiencing his first night out of the abbey. He’s sloppy, eager, the way most closeted queers are, and he’s fucking perfect, just what Gabriel needs. 

Once on the bed, Flip stands over him, one knee on the mattress, eyes heavy with unexpressed want. 

“Strip,” he says, voice deeper than Gabriel initially remembers it. Gabriel obeys, unbuttoning his jeans and yanking them off his ankles but either he’s too slow or Flip can’t wait a second longer because he starts tugging them off along with him, hands scrambling to tug at his boxers.

“You gonna fuck me right?” Gabriel asks, and there’s a sliver of worry that maybe Flip prefers it the other way around. Not that Gabriel has a problem with that, just that it isn’t what he needs right now. He needs a dick inside him to fuck him hard. He wants to forget himself. If Gabriel wanted a full workout, he’d have looked elsewhere.

“Is that what you want?” Flip asks. _Jesus,_ Gabriel thinks. Does this guy’s face ever betray emotion?

“I mean, yeah,” Gabriel says. “Isn’t that what’s gonna happen?”

Flip doesn’t blink and Gabriel would be unnerved except the weirdest shit gets his engine going. He has no idea what Flip is thinking at all. In another life, he would make a perfect conman, and maybe that’s why he goes by different names, though Gabriel has a strong suspicion his allegiances lie elsewhere like the opposite side of the law. 

Gabriel gestures to the nightstand with a tilt of his head. “Lube’s in the drawer.” 

He rolls onto all fours and hears the snap of the cap of lube and swallows. He’s sweating for it already, dick hard and heavy between his legs. He stretches his arms out, arches his back to ride the ripple of arousal rolling over him. _Yeah, yeah,_ he thinks, when he feels the cold drip of lubricant sliding down the crack of his ass. Then there’s Flip’s probing finger, thick and intrusive, stretching him open till Gabriel is panting and shuffling his knees wider for more. It’s not enough; soon he’s rocking back against Flip’s finger, shoulders trembling. Flip clamps a hand over his ass cheek, squeezing playfully before smacking him hard enough to leave a mark. 

Gabriel doesn’t fight off the violent shiver that accompanies the sting of Flip’s hand. In fact, the smacking makes him even harder, almost as hard as he’s ever gonna get with a finger up his ass.

“Get on with it already!”

“No talking,” Flip mocks softly, chapped lips brushing the shell of Gabriel’s ear, then he hears him fumbling with the condom which takes about half a minute longer than it should. Gabriel bumps his ass against Flip’s dick impatiently and _Jesus, _has to swallow down a noise of distress when Flip starts to push inside him. Obviously, he underestimated how difficult this was gonna be. It’s like fucking a fist, that’s how big Flip feels. Thick, fat, every inch of his cock a hot burning brand that has Gabriel gasping like a fish while his hole can’t seem to clench or relax. He’s never been fucked like this before; it feels like he’s being split in half.

Gabriel keeps his gaze forward, his teeth grit, and doesn’t make a sound when Flip starts to thrust. He can take it, Flip doesn’t need to slow down, he can take it. He wants it to hurt; this is what he needs: to be used and abused and debased. This is what he deserves. When Flip’s grip hardens almost painfully around his waist, Gabriel finally allows himself to exhale choppily through his nose. His mouth and his eyes are watering; his dick is so hard, dripping precome on the bed sheets. 

Flip’s hands stroke along his sides, moving down to grip his ass so he can spread Gabriel further apart and cram himself deeper. It feels good. Gabriel can hear himself make an embarrassing whining noise like an injured animal. Flip is so deep inside him it’s like a pole is lodged between his shoulder blades, keeping him in place.

“You like that?” Flip hums, plowing him like a fucking menace, fucking Gabriel hard and fast Gabriel can already tell he’s gonna feel it in the morning, maybe even for the rest of the week. Flip’s balls keep slapping Gabriel’s ass, and the bed is moving, a silent earthquake that has the headboard slamming repeatedly against the wall. Thud, thud, thud.

“_Shit_—_fucking—bastard—_”

The neighbors are gonna hear him, Gabriel thinks, there’s no way in hell they wouldn’t not with the ruckus they’re both making. Gabriel grins maniacally at the wall through sweat-soaked hair. He doesn’t give a shit; how can he when he’s getting the reaming of his fucking life.

“You want me to stop?” Flip says, pace slowing, worry starting to creep into his voice after Gabriel lets out a punched-out sob. 

“N-no, harder. I want it harder,” Gabriel rasps before moving his hips of his own accord, fucking himself on Flip’s dick like his life depended on it. He doesn’t slow down, can’t, too far gone to stop. 

Flip snorts a laugh behind him, then shoves him facedown with a hand curled around his neck for traction. It feels good, forces him into a complete surrender, and Gabriel knows he’s close as he starts groaning a number of expletives. He tilts his face into the pillow and feels sogginess against his cheek where he’s been panting like a dog.

Gabriel reaches for his dick so he could jerk himself off but Flip slaps his wrist away and curls a hand around his dick instead, pumping Gabriel in time with his thrusts. And all Gabriel can really do is spread his knees and rock helplessly backwards and forward, meeting Flip’s thrusts and then fucking his fist, like some cockhungry slut begging for more.

When he comes, it’s so explosive he swears he goes blind for a second. He comes to a minute later and Flip is still pounding into him, chasing his own orgasm, then he finally goes still and crumples on top of Gabriel, pinning him to the bed with his heavy weight. Gabriel can feel the pulse and throb of Flip’s dick through the condom as he empties himself into it, hips still twitching. He used to get off on the idea of come filling up his ass but he’s older now and doesn’t wanna risk it. Besides, there’s not a lot of people he trusts to do that with. Certainly not Flip who is practically a stranger though he seems harmless enough.

Gabriel shoves at Flip’s shoulder when the pressure in his ribs becomes uncomfortable.

Flip grunts, taking the hint. He rolls off Gabriel carefully, pulling out slowly so Gabriel’s poor, abused hole can finally clench up and _breathe_. It feels strangely empty now that Flip’s dick isn’t inside it and Gabriel rubs at his asshole self-consciously and laughs. The skin stings a little from the stretch and he already feels sore, but it’s a good kind of sore, the kind that precedes bone-deep satisfaction.

Flip, turned away after flicking the condom carelessly at the trash can, glances down at him with his eyebrows raised.

“_What_,” he says, like he’s not sure whether he’s in on the joke too.

Gabriel feels so fucked out, his mind blissfully blank for the first time in weeks that he doesn’t kick Flip out even though he’s overstayed his welcome and fulfilled his purpose. Maybe he’s getting soft, but really, if he can squeeze another hard fuck and blow job out of this, then he won’t mind having Flip hang around for a few more hours till Gabriel’s good mood evaporates.

Gabriel lolls his head across the pillow, stretches his arms over his head, pops a crick in his neck and flexes his toes, moaning in pleasure. Flip is staring at him with the hungry look of a starving man in the desert faced with a plateful of cake. Gabriel decides he likes it; it’s nice to be wanted. People who aren’t terrified of him loathe him to their core, or loathe the fact he makes their dick hard, or various iterations thereof. With Flip though, things seem simple enough. He wants Gabriel, and by the looks of things, is up for another round. Gabriel won’t say no to that but there’s such a thing as a refractory period when you’re thirty-four years old and past the prime of your life.

“You hungry?” he asks instead, “I got leftover pizza in the fridge.”

Now it’s Gabriel’s turn to look at Flip with wide-eyed with confusion. Flip won’t stop staring at him. “What?” Gabriel says. He rubs his cheek. “Something on my face?”

“Nothing— just,” Flip says. He brings a fingertip up to stroke the inside of Gabriel’s armpit where the hair is a soft and wispy red. Gabriel bites back a laugh, jerking away before batting at his hand. 

“You’re a redhead after all,” Flip muses. 

“You thought this was all hair dye?”

Flip rolls his eyes. “No.”

“Ah, so you’ve never been with a redhead,” Gabriel grins. Flip just gives him a look before rolling off the bed to fetch his boxers, rewarding Gabriel with a flash of ass when he bends to pick them up. Gabriel worries for a second that he’s pushed too far and now Flip is gonna leave, but then Flip tosses his underwear right at him and it becomes perfectly clear he’s staying for the night.

Gabriel fights off a smile, but he knows Flip can see it in his eyes anyway when he tugs his briefs on slow and lazy before standing to his feet.

* * *

  


Gabriel wakes up with a crick in his neck and a profound ache in his ass that he attributes to having just had someone’s cock rammed in there. It takes one maybe two minutes before he makes peace with the fact then he shrugs the weight of a heavy blanket from his person. Except, that isn’t a blanket wrapped around his middle like a vice but Flip’s arm. Flip who’d given him a ride home last night after his shift. Who kissed him without preamble, not even phased by the nicotine lacing his breath. Huh. He’s snoring with his mouth open on the pillow next to Gabriel’s head. His hair is a strangled mess, spilling across his nose and avalanching his whole face.

Gabriel remembers grabbing it a fair number of times last night, and how Flip had bent him over the kitchen sink and then later sucked him off in the shower, knelt on the grimy tile. But his ass still hurts like a bitch, no matter what a great time he had or the number of orgasms had. He finds his goodwill has all but disappeared overnight. The fog of uncertainty has lifted and he feels fully awake for the first time in days, maybe because he’s just gotten laid, maybe because it’s a weekend and he just slept past his alarm.

Whatever the reason, the fact remains: he needs to get rid of Flip so he could go on with the rest of his life.

Gabriel prods at Flip’s shoulder but the bastard sleeps like the dead. He pinches the tips of his nose together —and what a strong nose it is— to stop his breathing and

_ ah, there we go. _

Flip doesn’t wake, but he does snort and swat at Gabriel’s hand before rolling onto his side which is a vast improvement. He has broad shoulders, tapering down to a thick waist. There’s a scar about two inches long that bisects the inner crease of his elbow; he said he caught it on some barbed wire climbing fences as a kid, didn’t even realize it was infected till he came home that afternoon and it started to stink. Gabriel has exactly two scars on his body, at least two that matter anyway: one from a shrapnel wound on his shoulder, another one from his father right underneath his left rib.

When it seems nothing short of a tornado is gonna wake him , Gabriel puts some clothes on and sets out on foot to the convenience store where he buys bread, a carton of eggs and a pack of smokes. He buys milk too while he’s at it—it still comes in glass bottles around these parts—and because Gabriel delights in all things strange and kitsch it fills him with a perverse kind of pleasure; he spends an inordinate amount of time loitering outside the convenience store smoking and watching pedestrians go about their day: people on their way to work trying to avoid collision on the sidewalk, commuters hurrying to catch the bus, women being walked by their dogs pulled by long colorful leashes. He stands there for about half an hour observing everything. It’s September and there’s a chill in the air. The leaves are about to turn. It his him that he’s left New York over three months ago.

Gabriel finishes his second cigarette, leaves a ring of ash on the pavement, then goes back to the apartment where he immediately goes to check on Flip. He’s gone, no note, no indication he had ever spent the night except fort the indentation on the pillow next to the one Gabriel likes to sleep on. The sheets are pushed to one side of the bed, forming a little mountain.

Gabriel checks his reflection in the mirror above the bathroom sink: his lips are bitten and bruised, the skin there feels raw. There are sore spots all over his body and he can count them if he tries hard enough and remember with startling clarity what made each one hurt. He slides his fingers under his shirt and presses at them tenderly.

When he lets go, the slow release of pressure feels good.

* * *

Most people have hobbies but Gabriel isn’t like most people. He kills people for a living. The military didn’t want him and now neither apparently does New York where there used to be a surfeit of jobs for someone like him. The world is ever changing getting closer to the new millennium and every day Gabriel feels his place in it shrinking.

Maybe if things were different, if his mom had raised him instead of his dad, maybe then he’d have skills beyond knowing how to cut a body up with almost surgical precision. The heart, the lungs, the whole mess of the human digestive tract. He could’ve been anything, maybe even a doctor. He thinks he could’ve been a good one if only he went to college, but he never read any books front to cover except for that one by Hemingway which his father said filled his head with useless poetry: _you can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another._

Hemingway was right and in a way so was Gabriel’s father. There’s no outrunning yourself.

So Gabriel needs to get over this downswing in mood ASAP and find interests to keep him from walking into oncoming traffic. He tries to assimilate, first by relearning social cues then by doing the respectable thing and working an honest job. Work keeps him distracted, keeps him busy and on his toes. On Sundays, he goes to the cinema and buys an enormous tub of popcorn, laces his soda with rum so he can sit through an entire three-hour horror special without falling asleep. He spends whole afternoons in the park, birdseed in hand, watching cyclists and joggers whip past him and little kids flying their kites. Gabriel used to go through two packs of cigarettes a day, now he’s down to just one. He buys spackling paste to cover the holes in his walls. He helps his neighbor find her cat. She bakes him more banana bread which he takes to work.

Gabriel dreams about bridges, the water underneath them rising, rising. There are bodies in the water, like souls lost to the River Styx. One of them is his.

* * *

Here is a list of things Gabriel likes in no particular order: hot food, hot showers, cleaning his gun in the morning with the TV open to drown out the noise of early traffic. New bed sheets, gin and tonic, a good cup of joe, the perverse satisfaction of peeling at a scab only to discover it hasn’t healed yet. Cracking his knuckles and kissing the crucifix around his neck for good luck. He’s fascinated by news anchors who seem unflappable in the face of natural disasters and general chaos. His favourite TV show is Mork and Mindy. He sleeps with a gun tucked under his pillow and has nightmares when he doesn’t.

Gabriel hates: fireworks, birds of any kind, sleeping in motels where he doesn’t know where any of the exits are. The whole state of Montana where he lived for a full year, hopping trains and hitchhiking all the way west when he was sixteen. He hates eating fish, doors left partway open. And his father, whose first name he shares as well as his love of a good gin and tonic. He taught Gabriel to shoot first and ask questions later, and there was no place Gabriel could go where his father couldn’t find him.

Now Gabriel’s here out west carving out a new life for himself and his father is dead but so is everyone else that matters. He never thought it would be so fucking boring.

* * *

The money from the Murphy job finally comes through. It only takes a few well-placed threats before he’s finally wired the other half of the payout and even then it doesn’t make a substantial dent in his accounts. It’s enough to make rent however, but there’s still the question of what the fuck he’s gonna do for the rest of the year. There’s also the question of what the fuck he’s going to do for the rest of his life but Gabriel tries to take it one step at a time. Easy to worry about the things in front of him than the big picture because otherwise it’s just gonna fuck with his headspace.

The same thing happened to him after he was kicked out of the military: he was in a bad place after that, couldn’t sleep for a whole month and he ended up gambling away his savings on dog fights, strip clubs, and underground poker. Little Jackie found him lying in a pool of his own vomit outside a bar in Dumbo and asked him what he was doing with his life. Then he asked Gabriel if he wanted to come work for him after putting him to rights and giving him a lift home.

When left to his own devices, Gabriel lacks direction and purpose. He gets bored. He’s excellent at following orders and tying up loose ends, keeping people’s secrets, but without someone to tell him where to go or what to do next he goes a little stir-crazy. He hasn’t been accepting jobs close to a year and it’s taking a toll on his sanity, but more importantly his funds. If he isn’t careful with his spending, he may end up not having any.

So: he can’t quit his job at Larry’s, that much is clear. He’s practically working for peanuts but at least there's money coming in. Now all he needs to do is put out feelers and see if anyone is interested in hiring an ex-crook.

* * *

Then there’s Flip. One of the many perks of Gabriel’s job is people-watching and seeing who comes up to the counter and orders what. Gin made people angry drunks but most of their customers prefer beer from the tap and Gabriel, unlike Larry, has a generous pour. At least if he thinks the person deserves it. Otherwise he serves watered down beer.

Flip, Gabriel discovers, never orders for himself and isn’t that just fucking interesting. He comes in every Saturday night between eight to eight thirty and apologizes to his buddies for always being late. He’s always late. None of them seem to mind except that one guy Felix who watches him with the fevered eyes of a hawk about to snatch prey bigger than themselves except they don’t realize it until it’s too late.

They’re interesting to watch. Ivan, short for Ivanhoe— Jesus, what kind of parents did this guy have— is the big guy, always drunk. He comes in tipsy, leaves three sheets to the wind, says some pretty funny shit that make Gabriel have to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing out loud. Then there’s Walter—the Leader— always paying for the drinks, always early, drives a fiery red Datsun that he parks in the handicap lane even while the rest of the parking lot is free. Gabriel brought it up to Larry once but Larry didn’t really care as long as people paid for their drinks and didn’t cause too much trouble. He knew these guys since they were teenagers coming in with fake IDs and playing hooky. He went to school with their parents. They were good kids, he said, not always perfect but they didn’t hurt nobody.

Gabriel, however, digresses. But what does he know; he’s just here passing time until the next job rolls around. He’s taken to walking in the morning—he doesn’t jog, would kill himself first before he started— and wonders what universe he’d woken up in that he has enough time to kill to walk around without any purpose.

His shifts don’t tire him out nearly as much and he finds that he even enjoys them. Waking up to a routine, eating food he made and not just something bought from the corner store, running errands here and there whenever Emmett goes AWOL on Larry. He still has to take the bus to get anywhere; probably selling his car wasn’t the wisest thing to do but he wanted a fresh start and that car had more history than he cares to remember.

He’s taking out the trash an hour before closing when he hears the yowl of a cat. Gabriel looks up, tossing the last of the garbage bags into the dumpster and sees Flip’s silhouette at the end of the street.

There’s a single lamp attached to the exterior of the building, way up near the roof overhang, and it throws a weak yellow circle onto the sidewalk. Flip is pacing around it while smoking a cigarette with his head down, his free hand stuffed in his pocket. A light chill is settling in so he puffs his breath out, and they exhale into white clouds that dissipate in the air. He sniffs at his hand, then a moment later snaps his gaze up so his eyes meet Gabriel’s dead on. Gabriel acknowledges him with a bob of his head before lifting his hand in an awkward wave.

“You all right?” he asks, which could mean any number of things but right now he’s just making conversation.

“Yeah sure.” Flip shrugs, takes another hit of his cigarette and then smiles before exhaling. Gabriel almost misses it, the action so fleeting that he half-believes he just imagined it. What he do doesn’t miss is the way Flip’s eyes travel down the length of his face and then settle on his lips, because even at a distance, his lust for Gabriel is almost too obvious to be ignored.

Gabriel has been thinking about him too, about that time in the shower when they both took turns sucking each other off. Flip has big hands and he knows how to use them, and the same can be said for his talented mouth. Gabriel has been determinedly jerking off to thoughts about him: of the two of them fucking, sitting, standing, kneeling, or any number of other creative positions his idle mind could cook up. It’s made for an interesting few weeks. His hand has started to cramp.

Now Gabriel can’t stop thinking about his mouth again. Damnit. He’s always been weak for a pair of soft lips.

“Hey,” he says, “You think I can bum one of those?”

Flip glances at his cigarette, comically dwarfed by the size of his hand, before patting around his back pockets for his packet of smokes, badly flattened and disfigured. He manages to conjure a cigarette that isn’t too badly malformed before leaning over quickly to light it up and step away. Gabriel notices the wide berth Flip gives him and doesn’t comment on it.

“So are you gonna tell me what happened,” Gabriel says,“Because you just upped and left. Thought you and I were having fun.”

Flip looks at him in mild surprise. “I thought you didn’t want me hanging around.”

That’s true but Gabriel’s having a fun time yanking Flip’s chain so he goes along with it. “That hurt my feelings, you know.”

Flip snorts. “Bullshit.”

“Your friends know what you’re up to when you’re not busy attending your little club meetings?”

“Well they’re not strictly speaking my friends,” Flip reminds him, “So they don’t give a shit what I do outside club hours. I mean shit, it’s not a fucking club, all right? It’s an organization.” He says it like it comes in quotation marks.

“Yeah well, that’s just a fancy way of saying club isn’t it,” says Gabriel.

Flip looks like he actually agrees but is trying his damnedest to steel himself from laughter. “It’s not what it looks like,” he says. “It’s just a bunch of guys getting together for a drink every now and then. Having fun. That sort of thing.”

“So like a book club then,” Gabriel decides. “Except instead of reading books you guys complain about black folks.”

“Pretty much, yeah,” Flip agrees, amusement shining in his eyes. There’s something in his expression too, a hint of disbelief as he flicks the ash off his cigarette. “You hit the nail on the head.”

“Except you’re not like them, are you,” Gabriel says. “You’re different. I see you going along with flow, agreeing to whatever they say or do. You ask a lot of questions.”

Flip looks at him, amused. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Your friends all call you Ron,” Gabriel tells him. “But you told me your name was Flip. So what is it really? Ron or Flip? I wanna know what name I should call when I’m jerking off in bed.”

Flip’s expression doesn’t waver which is testament to his skills. Gabriel has met plenty of liars before; he comes across them everyday in his line of work but Flip is something else. His eyes are cool and unreadable. For a second, neither of them blinks.

“You sure you’re not an undercover cop?” Gabriel says.

Flip crushes his cigarette under the toe of his shoe. He’s taking a long time to answer. Gabriel doesn’t mind, he likes watching him, though it’s interesting to note that Flip doesn’t fidget even when he’s caught in a lie.

“Anyone ever tell you you ask too many questions?” he says, a safe response buoying them away from the present conversation. 

“I just like to keep myself informed.” Gabriel grins.“So what is it then: Ron or Flip?” He’s being pushy, but only because he’s curious to see when or if it’ll wear Flip out. He’s good at this. Pushing, nudging, crossing the line. Afterward he might come to regret it, but he’s always been a reckless bastard. He’ll deal with the consequences when the time comes.

“Are you a cop?” Gabriel presses.

Flip just looks at him and doesn’t answer.

* * *

Gabriel likes sex just as much as the next person which means sometimes he likes to work for it but most times he can’t be bothered. He’s getting old now anyhow and sex is just sex. Sometimes it’s spectacular when you have it with the right person but each time more or less is the same: the wait slow and overly drawn out, then an underwhelming finish. He loved Claire more than anything, her long dainty fingers and her soft hair, but sometimes when he fucked her he felt like he was playing a charade, picking from a catalogue of characters he felt like being that day. He wanted to be needed and he loved that he was everything she seemed to want in a man. They were going to have kids together.

And then there’s Flip.

For someone trying to fly under the radar and pass as heterosexual, he certainly makes his intentions known short of shining a beacon of light in the sky.

Gabriel gets off work at midnight and there Flip is in the parking lot the second time around, leaning against the side of his car with the air of someone who just happened to be casually loitering around even when they had no right to be.

There’s a pile of cigarettes at his feet. It looks like he’s been here awhile. His buddies have all left the bar an hour ago, their wives sure to give them hell for breaking curfew. Does Flip have a wife, Gabriel wonders. He doesn’t know. He’s a fucking stranger. His eyes are bright like maybe he’s had a little bit to drink, not enough that he’d be a road hazard but just so he has a plausible excuse to do what he’s about to. Ah, the convenience of liquid courage, Gabriel thinks, and tries to hold his tongue when Flip asks him if his shift is over. Of course it is: the bar is shuttered behind Gabriel.

This is shaping up to become a routine. Gabriel should be careful not to fall for it.

He has no fucking clue what Flip wants apart from casual sex and while casual sex is something Gabriel can do without putting up a lot of fuss Gabriel still doesn’t trust him.

He’s probably a cop and cottoned on to the fact Gabriel is not a straight laced taxpaying citizen of Colorado Springs. And he doesn’t have a lot of variety or taste in his wardrobe: he looks like a cross between a Canadian lumberjack and a biology school teacher with his ill-fitting button ups and trucker hats and his scuffed up shoes abraded from wear.

But he still makes Gabriel’s dick hard like nothing else. Gabriel says yes when Flip asks him if he needs a ride home and he hops into his car and slides into the passenger seat thrumming with energy.

The answer would’ve always been yes, in the end; it wouldn’t have required a second thought.

* * *

Gabriel’s body melts against Flip’s hands when Flip shoves him inside the apartment and up against the wall. He’s keyed up, a hundred miles an hour, not stopping for anything come hell or high water. Gabriel likes that; it’s been two weeks since they’ve last fucked and waiting for Flip to return his sly glances is like waiting for molasses to grow: there’s only so much sitting around Gabriel can do before he gives up the cause and fucks off elsewhere.

Gabriel grins and shoves back just because and Flip backs up half a foot when the action stops him from kissing Gabriel. For a second, Flip looks like he’s vacillating between hurt and confused before his expression settles to just plain annoyance. Gabriel can already tell he’s gonna have fun tonight. No one’s taken off their clothes and he’s still entertained.

“What?” Flip says, fisting his shirt, his breath hot on Gabriel’s face. It reeks of stale beer. “Don’t you want to?”

Gabriel laughs, tipping his head to the side so he could look at Flip through the fan of his eyelashes. Coy, coquettish, except he’s anything but. “Cute,” he tells Flip, sliding his palm up the meat of his arm, slow and deliberate. “I invite you to my home and the first thing you do is try to shove your tongue in my mouth?” He clicks his tongue. “Where are your manners Flip? You think I’m that easy?”

The confusion is back tenfold until Flip realizes he’s being played. A second later, Gabriel tastes the tang of alcohol in Flip’s breath when their teeth knock together painfully; he’s dizzy for a full second but after that he groans into it. Flip breaks for air only when Gabriel gives his chest a light shove; their lips part with a smack when Gabriel gives him yet another shove, sending Flip staggering back with his eyes wild and lust-blown. He’s breathing hard but then so is Gabriel.

“Still haven’t changed your mind on the no kissing front?” Flip says, dark eyes unblinking, amused.

Gabriel manages to hold in his laughter. “You haven’t given me any reason to,” he shrugs. “You come here to fuck me?”

“What do you think?” Flip pins Gabriel to the door again and this time Gabriel is ready for it. His breath is hot, his whole body is hot. So are Flip’s palms sliding up Gabriel’s hips, promising him everything, burning a brand through the denim. He has such big hands; he has such big everything. Flip’s hands are high up on his ribs, his thumbs just under Gabriel’s nipples, Gabriel’s shirt hiked way up. Cool air glances over Gabriel’s back.

Gabriel arches up, rubs his clothed dick shamelessly against Flip’s strong thigh. He’s a solid wall against him: his arms and chest firm when Gabriel rubs harder. They move together, and the only sound in Gabriel’s ear is Flip’s rough breath.

Gabriel licks his salty neck and Flip’s hands tighten on Gabriel’s ribs, hips jerking forward as he sucks Gabriel’s bottom lip between his teeth. They’re locked together, hips pulsing, and Gabriel tangles his hand in Flip’s hair and thinks, fuck me, come on already just fuck me, feeling delirious like he’s never been in a long long time.

“Take your clothes off,” Flip says, and Gabriel flashes back to two weeks ago when Flip ordered him to do the same. He’s harder than ever, but he manages to laugh in Flip’s face to keep up pretenses.

“Someone’s horny.”

Gabriel starts unbuttoning his shirt but Flip takes his wrists and immediately starts pulling his hands away, taking his shirt off himself and then undoing his belt. It hits the floor with a clink and then Flip is walking Gabriel back to the bedroom where the back of his knees hit the bed and then suddenly he’s being shoved flat on his back. He still has his briefs on and Flip rolls him over on his stomach without preamble, dragging his underwear down to the seat of his ass.

Gabriel doesn’t expect the slap that lands flat on his ass cheek and it forces a shocked laugh out of him that Flip must take the wrong way because he doesn’t do it again even if Gabriel is squirming for it. The skin tingles sharply from the contact where the elastic of his briefs sit. Gabriel bites down on a grin when he hears Flip rummaging around the nightstand for the lube. Then the bed dips behind Gabriel, forcing him to look over his shoulder to get a peek at Flip’s dick. Yes, he’s fucking enormous, also circumcised, but unlike most men Gabriel have fucked and been fucked by, he’s the only one who knows what to do with it.

“I’m getting cold,” Gabriel complains, craning his neck further to see what Flip is up to. Taking his sweet time with the lube, apparently. “Are we gonna do this today or what?”

“You ever stop talking?”

“No,” Gabriel says, digging his fingers into the bed sheets. Flip makes him wait while he squeezes lube onto his fingers before tugging Gabriel’s briefs the rest of the way down; then all Gabriel gets in warning is a squeeze to the hip before Flip is spreading him open with two slick fingers. He grits his teeth against it—it takes him completely by surprise—and forces himself to relax and loosen up. One shaky breath and then two, and he’s leaning into Flip’s touch tentatively, unclenching his muscles as Flip breaches him in measured strokes. Flip isn’t being rough or overly forceful at all but there’s a purpose to his movements like he’s figuring out which spots Gabriel likes being teased.

“Fuck!” Flip lays a hand on Gabriel’s back, just above the base of his spine, and the coolness of his palm makes Gabriel realize for the first time how flushed he is from head to toe. “Ah, fuck, yeah—get in there. Shit.”

“You like that?” Flip says, probing so deep with his fingers Gabriel can feel his knuckles brush his rim. “Getting your ass fingered?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Gabriel huffs.

“You’ll let anyone fuck you,” Flip says, “Anyone with a dick.”

Gabriel gives him an incredulous look. Really, Flip chooses now to be chatty? What is this, dirty talk? “I don’t know what you want me to say. Yeah, I love a finger or two up my ass. Look, can we just get this over with whatever this is? I thought you were gonna fuck me—”

“Not with that kind of attitude I’m not,” Flip says, looking personally offended even with his fingers buried in Gabriel’s ass, still and unmoving.

“Just fuck me already!” Gabriel shrieks.

“Fuckin’ asshole,” Flip mutters, and Gabriel can’t even refute that as he watches Flip start rolling on the condom with a frown. It takes about a quarter of a minute, longer than Gabriel has the patience for that by the time Flip is done, he’s practically shaking from a combination of barely suppressed impatience and arousal. His dick is so hard he feels like his skin is about to explode. The whole of him, really, so desperate for Flip to just get on with it and bury his dick in Gabriel’s ass like he’s been wanting the second Flip shoved him against the door.

Flip kneels behind him and places a hand between his shoulder blades, pushing him down onto his chest so he’s facedown on the pillows with his ass high up in the air. His nipples rub deliciously agains the bed sheets. Gabriel spreads his knees, needing it now more than ever and Flip pushes in, slow and measured, not stopping until he’s buried to the very hilt, even when Gabriel starts to wail.

Fuck, he’s huge, even bigger than Gabriel remembers.

All Gabriel can do is spread his thighs and take it, whining each time Flip’s dick slides home. He breathes choppily through his teeth when Flip starts picking up the pace, balls slapping his ass as he grabs Gabriel by the hips and really starts to put his back into it.

Flip may kiss like a man on death row but he fucks like his life depended on it. Hard, inelegant, balls-deep with every thrust; Gabriel sees fucking stars and starts to drool on the pillow. “Yeah,” Gabriel moans, gripping the sheets, the bed rocking beneath them like a restless wave, “Yeah, fuck, that’s it. Fuck me, ah, ahhh, that’s so —Jesus your dick is so fucking huge—” Then Flip stops abruptly, pulling out to leave Gabriel’s poor stretched-out hole empty and wanting, clenching on nothing but air. It leaves sunspots dancing in his vision, but once he recovers he fixes Flip the most vile fucking look.

“The fuck?”

“On your back,” Flip says. 

Gabriel blinks at him, once, then twice. “What?”

“I said, on your back,” Flip repeats, and he shouldn’t look so hot with his hard dick in his hand and his eyes all crazed, but he does, and it gets Gabriel’s engine going. He rolls onto his back, letting his knees fall open deliberately before planting his feet flat on the bed. Flip is staring at him openly, breathing heavy. Gabriel’s dick twitches and he resists the urge to reach between his legs and give himself a few pumps while Flip is watching him with a leonine expression.

“What now,” Gabriel says.

“Tuck your knees up.” And isn’t he full of surprises. Gabriel grins in delight. “Spread your legs,” Flip adds. “Show me your hole.”

Kinky, Gabriel thinks, and he’s been with plenty of people before who were into some pretty wild shit but the way Flip says it gets him so inexplicably hot he’s actually sweating, pushing out drops of precome from his slit. So he shows Flip his hole: empty, needing to be filled, flushed raw from its earlier fucking.

Gabriel rubs at his perineum, pops his index finger into his mouth to wet it so he could tease the rim himself before dipping inside. He groans at the sensation of being filled but it’s not enough and he needs more. Flip’s fingers are thick, maybe twice the width of his, and Gabriel can come from just getting fingered by him whereas if he did it himself he’ll never finish.

Flip grabs him by the wrist to still his movements, then wrenches his legs further apart. His palms span Gabriel’s thighs entirely when his fingers are spread wide. That’s gonna leave bruises, Gabriel thinks. And then: Jesus, it’s like he’s in a fucking porno. Ginger twink gets creamed by undercover cop. 

“Oh, so you wanna do it this way? Missionary?” Gabriel says. Face to face with him on his back, knees by his ears, but that’s the last thing he gets to say before Flip pries his asscheeks apart with his thumbs and licks leisurely into his hole.

“Fuuuuck!” Gabriel groans, eyes rolling back in their sockets.

He’s not expecting that, mostly because Flip looks like the kind of man who prefers straight-laced cock to ass fucking. None of this ass to mouth stuff that surely only decorated queers know. But he’s good at it, a fucking champ Gabriel wonders if he does this to every guy he fucks, because his tongue is a thing of magic, deftly spearing Gabriel open till he’s sloppy and wet, skin of his thighs tingling from the unforgiving rasp of Flip’s stubble.

Flip sucks him off with three fingers holding him open, and then jerks himself off until he spills white and hot over the soft planes of Gabriel’s belly. Gabriel watches him groan and fist his cock violently through half-lidded eyes and when Flip finally looks up from where he’s staring at Gabriel’s hole, he looks a fair bit sheepish. His neck and chest are flushed a deep red, would look better if decorated in scratches but Gabriel is feeling far too comfortable and lax to get up and do anything about it. He’s just had a wonderful orgasm. All he needs now is a good smoke to top it off.

“So,” Gabriel says, reaching for his pack of cigarettes on the nightstand. “How about you give me back my bullets before I let you fuck me for the third time?”

Flip just looks at him and snorts out a laugh.

* * *

Organized crime is the same everywhere, the only difference being the color of terrain underfoot. There’s no shortage of people willing to backstab each other for the right price. That’s where people like Gabriel come in, they’re willing to get their hands wet and do the dirty laundry too on top of everything else.

Gabriel makes some calls. He has connections that can hook him up with the right kind of people though from the looks of things Colorado Springs will be a tough market to crack. But business is business is business. All he needs is to get his name out there.

Building a reputation from the ground up can take time however, and it’s time he doesn’t have when he’s starting to get antsy and progressively broke. So he calls Joe because Joe knows everybody.

He’s been in the business ever since Gabriel can remember, is practically an institution by mob standards. People can come to him for anything: money, drugs, advice on marital problems, tipoffs on who’s betraying whom or whose wife is sleeping around, you name it. All he asks for in return is that you do him a small a favor. (And it’s never really small, from Gabriel’s experience.) He’ll call on you, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but when that day comes, boy you better drop everything and haul ass because if you fuck with Joe you fuck with the family. And the mob is family.

Joe gives Gabriel a number with a name to accompany it which Gabriel then proceeds to write on the back of a receipt for bread and eggs while he’s on lunch break. After work, he uses a payphone and dials the number but it keeps going to voicemail. The next day, he tries again. It takes two rings before someone picks up. That same night, Gabriel takes his spare gun from its hiding place behind the couch cushions. 

* * *

Tuesday finds Gabriel in a joke shop browsing rows and rows of clown costumes. He’s sweating in the oppressive humidity of the room; he’s not here by choice. There’s a shelf teetering with all sorts of knickknacks behind him: board games, whoopee cushions, boxes of fake cigarettes and tricky dice. He’s waiting for Louis Morello who has a job for him lined up. They spoke on the phone briefly—Joe came through after all—but Louis Morello wants to meet with him first to make sure Gabriel’s story checks out, that he is who he says he is.

Gabriel can’t really blame him. He has a healthy distrust of everyone in the business because crooks are liars first and foremost. It’s every man for himself even before the ship starts to sink because everyone knows it’s gonna happen sooner or later, the only question being when.

“You come here in often?” a voice says and Gabriel immediately looks up from where he’s been idly poking at a box of overpriced playing cards. It’s a man in his mid forties in a pinstriped shirt, gold chain around his neck and three days’ worth of prickly beard. His toupee has seen better days; hell, that shirt has seen better days. Gabriel can practically see a hint of hairy nipple and almost recoils in horror.

“Hey, sorry, but I’m not into that kind of stuff,” he says just to be polite. He goes back to browsing, walking further down an aisle of random bric-a-brac.

“Wait,” the man says. “You the guy?”

Gabriel flicks his gaze up to meet his just the once. “Depends what you’re really asking.”

“I’m a friend of Joe’s. Told me to get in touch with you but he didn’t have your number. Said you could help me with a problem.”

“Depends what kind of problem it is,” Gabriel says, gaze sliding over to the man’s head before flitting away.

“Louis Morello,” the man says, giving him a once over but not offering his hand to shake.

Gabriel waits a beat while he sizes the man up. There’s doubt in his expression, but Gabriel is used to people doubting his ability to get the job done because he doesn’t look like the total thug everyone is expecting: lean on the side of lanky, his face soft like choir boy’s. His father used to call him a queer and he may be long dead now but he was right on the mark. Gabriel is a fucking queer who loves taking it up the ass, he can’t get enough of it that it’s practically a weakness, but he can also outrun cops fast as anything and he never misses a shot.

Gabriel can take a punch as hard as he can give them; he was in the military for all of five years and almost died twice, first in the line of fire, then in a gambling den in Saigon. People can doubt him all they want but in the end they’ll come running back because he’s the real deal. He’s done things most people won’t be able to stomach even in their worst dreams; he’s taken more pain than he cares to but chalks it up to occupational hazard. For him, it’s just a job.

That’s why Louis Morello gives him a once-over. If it weren’t for Joe vouching for him, Morello probably wouldn’t even be here. They negotiate a price in a busy diner halfway across town where Morello knows all the waitresses. He orders a cup of coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich that Gabriel watches him eat with his mouth half-open the entire time.

When he’s done, wiping the corners of his lips with a wad of paper napkins, he hands Gabriel a slip of paper with an address on it and has the gall to haggle down to 60% of Gabriel’s initial asking price. “You do this for me O’Malley, I’ll give you the rest of the money.”

He promises to keep in touch right after he pays for his bill and leaves.

Gabriel still doesn’t shake his hand.

* * *

Gabriel has underestimated the size and depth of Morello’s ‘problem’. The problem takes him to a suburb near the U.S. Air Force Academy. His mark is a professor teaching Military Strategic Studies with a wife and two kids and a mistress he wires money to on occasion. What his wife doesn’t know about him will astound her. He owes several people money and is on the shit list of a few of Morello’s friends. Apparently the poor bastard has a bit of a gambling problem. Gabriel follows him around for a couple of days before cornering him on his way to pick up the groceries.

“Hey Mr. Richardson!” he calls, and Gabriel shoots him in the chest right when Richardson turns to look at him. His body goes limp and the bag of groceries in his arms plummets to the ground, bread and fruit and eggs scattering everywhere. Gabriel takes an orange from the carnage and starts peeling it with his fingernail, squatting next to Richard’s bleeding body lying prone on the ground. His eyes stare unseeingly at the sky overheard. It’s a warm day for September, the sun unusually bright. A good day to die, with the kind of weather people might even call temperate.

Gabriel drags Richardson’s body and heaves it into the trunk of his own car. It’s not until he hits the road that things start going pear-shaped. He hears the sirens first before anything and pretty soon a pair of red flashing lights are accompanying them. Perfect time to get pulled over when his fingernails are covered in blood and he’s driving a stolen vehicle. If he were still in New York, this wouldn’t even be a problem; the mob has half the city police on its payroll.

But this is Colorado Springs so like any good citizen Gabriel slows down and rolls the window open.

“Good day officer,” he says, just barely stopping himself from pulling out his gun. He grins at the cop. He looks young, bright-eyed and fresh from police school, probably in his twenties: oh this is gonna be so fucking easy. He’s even wearing glasses, squinting down at Gabriel with a notepad in hand.

“Do you know how fast you were going?”

“There was no speed-limit posted,” Gabriel says in his best simpering tone. “Can you write me off with a warning? Am from out of town. Won’t do it again, I promise.”

“Everything okay there, Ronnie?”

Gabriel rolls his eyes. Probably the junior officer’s senior or something on babysitting duty. He glances at the rearview mirror as the senior officer approaches them. He’s not in uniform. Off-duty? A little huff escapes Gabriel at the absurdity of it all and then it hits him all of a sudden why that voice sounded so familiar:

Because it’s Flip’s.

* * *

Flip opens the door when Gabriel has his forearms buried in a shirt. He really needs to fix the lock, can’t have people breaking and entering all the time. He just finished cutting up Richardson’s body and putting the gnarly bits in garbage bags which now sit crowding his bathroom. Gabriel isn’t expecting visitors, not now or ever if he can help it. Ever since running into Flip this morning, he’s been jittery all day, distracted, and now Flip is turning him around to face him, reaching back and grabbing the back of his shirt at the nape of the neck so he could pull it down over his back.

“You gonna tell me what that was this morning?”

“You think I owe you an explanation,” Gabriel says slowly, shaking his hair out of his eyes. “You caught me speeding. Let me off with a warning. And now you’re in my apartment, officer—” he tries to recall what officer Ronald Peterson had called Flip earlier. Zimmerman. Yeah, that’s it. “Officer Zimmerman.”

“I’m not a patrol officer.”

“You think I give a shit?”

“I’m a detective,” Flip says, and looks at Gabriel with his half confused look that makes him want to laugh.

“I could smell it from a mile away, anyways. You give off a noticeable vibe.” Gabriel lets his gaze run the length of Flip’s body, from his feet up and then back again.

“You stole that car didn’t you,” Flip states.

“What are you gonna do, arrest me? You got any proof, _detective_? You can’t go around making bold claims like that. What is that, slander?” When Flip looks at him, silent, Gabriel just chuckles and shakes his head. “Also, you just broke into my apartment without warning which I believe counts as a felony. Who’s the bad guy here, really?”

“I—“ Flip says then flounders. “The door wasn’t locked—”

“Yeah, been meaning to fix that.”

“You got blood on you,” Flip points out, swiping the corner of Gabriel’s cheek with his thumb, without warning.

Gabriel moves out of the way before he can touch him again, wiping his cheek on the hem of his shirt, the action streaking the rest of his face with caked-up blood. Well, nothing he could do about that. Human bodies just happen to be full of blood. He’ll take his shower later once Flip is out of his hair.

The whole place smells like bleach and carbolic acid and his hands hurt from scrubbing the bathroom top to bottom. Gabriel stuffs a third garbage bag with the accumulated crap of a man living a life of free-wheeling selfhood: beer cans and boxes of takeout pizza, the contents of Richardson’s wallet which he still has lying around. He has to stomp on a scuttling cockroach that crawls free from a paper pail of half-eaten Chinese food before tying the garbage bag and hefting it over his shoulder, taking the stairs to two at a time so he could dump the bag in the alley separating his building from the laundromat.

The other bags with Richardson’s remains will be delivered straight to Morello who requires proof of his killing before he pays Gabriel in full. After, Gabriel will probably sell Richardson’s car to the scrap yard for easy money.

Flip catches up to him halfway down the street. “Gabriel,” he says. “Gabe.”

The only person to call him that got a buckshot to the teeth for his efforts. “What,” Gabriel hisses. “I’m not in the mood to play fucking house right now. What do you want?”

Flip looks conflicted. Poor bastard doesn’t seem to know how to respond to that but Gabriel can read him, the line of tension in his body, his jaw shifting and his clenched teeth. Just like the first night when Flip looked at him with every intention to bend him over the hood of his car except he was too deeply terrified of the consequences after. His buddies at the bar are all assholes; they probably know shit about his nighttime proclivities. Gabriel is tired after a long day of driving a dead body home and the labor-intensive chore of cutting it up in his bath tub, though at the same time he’s thrumming with restless energy just underneath the skin. He gets like this after every job: bones electric like they’re attached to a live wire as he rides the high of a job well done, sometimes he even gets hard.

And well, he’s hard now too, mostly because Flip is here, looking like he might go off like a fuse any moment. Flip had convinced officer Peterson to go on easy on Gabriel, made up some bullshit story about how Gabriel was an old friend of his, one of the good guys, never mind that his t-shirt had a spot of blood on it and the backseat of the car was full of assorted junk that obviously didn’t belong to him but Richardson’s daughters.

When Peterson let Gabriel go, Gabriel was careful to keep to the speed limit. He smoked half a pack of cigarettes on his way home, driving with the windows down and Richardson’s brand of bland Christian rock on the radio.

Flip is staring him down, mouth open like he wants to say something. He’d be more handsome if he stopped frowning, if he stopped looking at Gabriel with suspicion. But maybe that’s the draw of it.

Gabriel doesn’t want Flip to like him. He’s fine with their arrangement. Affection is dangerous and he doesn’t have any left to spare, not after he buried Claire.

“Make up your damn mind Zimmerman,” Gabriel sighs, rolling his eyes at the sky and throwing up his hands in frustration. “Are you here to fuck me or arrest me? Because I’m not gonna wait for you all day. I got things to do. I’m a busy man.”

That seems to be the right thing to say because Flip drags him by the lapels and shoves him up against the brick of the building. “You’re an asshole, you know that?” he pants against Gabriel’s lips.

Gabriel moans even as his head hits the wall behind it, then wastes no time feeling Flip up under his shirt, rubbing his hard dick through the denim of his jeans. He goes down on his knees and starts unbuckling Flip’s belt, freeing his cock and pressing his mouth to the warmth of his skin and his balls. Gabriel chokes on his own drool when Flip starts fucking his throat, one hand braced on the wall while the other cups the back of Gabriel’s neck.

Gabriel doesn’t care that they’re doing this in the alley. He kills people for a living, it’s not the worst he’s done. It’s late afternoon with the sun sinking into shadows and there’s the slow rumble of traffic on the street to remind them that they’re still in a public place, only partially hidden from view by a dumpster.

Flip has a condom in his wallet, because of course he does, and the lubricant in his back pocket may be a little suspect but Gabriel says nothing about it. He’s too far gone after being fingered into a frenzy and he doesn’t even think twice about letting Flip fuck him over a crate. It’s rough, angry: his feet bob in the air with every deep thrust. He gets splinters on his fingers from holding onto the wood while Flip bears down on him, stretching him nice and open with his big fat cock and then gripping his ankles hard enough to leave finger-shaped bruises.

“Fuck you,” Gabriel hisses while Flip pounds him hard against the flimsy wood. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

There’s bird shit on the ground and the smell of car exhaust and rotting garbage are all around them but Flip’s scent is overriding everything: his skin is salty with sweat and his clothes reek of cigarette smoke. There’s coffee in his breath, the smell of ink like he’s been chewing on pens all day.

“I like you like this,” Flip confesses. “When you’re nice and sweet for me because you have my cock up your ass.”

“Well, it’s the only time I can stand you,” Gabriel tells him. “Otherwise I just wish you’d shut up. You’re annoying, and you have shit taste in clothes and your friends are all assholes. The only thing I like about you is your dick.”

“You like my dick, huh?” Flip says, which should not be his main takeaway here. “You like sitting on it? Sucking it? Makes you feel good, doesn’t it? Your hole’s fucking greedy, just like you.”

Right on the mark. “Big dicks make me feel good,” Gabriel agrees with an airy laugh. “In general,” he adds.

“I bet anyone will do for you,” Flip muses. “The mailman, the guy that brings in the paper. Saw how officer Peterson was looking at you this morning. Maybe you’re his type. Maybe you’d like it if he bent you over the patrol car and pushed his dick inside you real slow while I watch. People would be driving down the highway and they’d see you taking dick from a police officer.”

“Are you fantasizing about Ronnie here or me? Because I can’t tell.”

Flip angles his thrust to hit Gabriel’s prostate dead on and Gabriel yelps. “Shut up— you’d, you’d like that, I bet.”

“You watching or that patrol officer fucking me?”

“Both,” Flip says.

Gabriel grins, neither confirming nor denying this. It seems Flip is on a roll because the guy can’t stop talking. It’s the most Gabriel has gotten out of him. Usually they just fuck and are done with it, but something must be in the air tonight or maybe Flip must have eaten something because he’s more intense than ever, fucking Gabriel with violent snaps of his hips that almost displace him from the crate. It’s almost too much if it didn’t feel so good to be completely and blissfully surrendered to the feeling of being used.

Gabriel just lies there and takes it, an empty hole waiting and needing to be filled. 

“Gonna give it to you better than any of them,” Flip grunts, as if he isn’t already, as if he’s not fucking Gabriel with everything he’s got.

“Come on then,” Gabriel goads him. “Give it me. Show me, fuck. Show me what you’ve got. Fuck my hole with that big fucking dick. Shit—”

Gabriel makes unholy noises when Flip bottoms out. The bastard doesn’t touch his cock even once, just rams Gabriel’s prostate till he blanks out in pleasure, a low whimper escaping him when Flip finally allows him to give his dick a few tugs.

When it’s over, Flip pulls out with a grunt, catching his breath and staring at him moodily, his limp cock jutting out the seam of his jeans. He doesn’t help Gabriel off the crate, but Gabriel doesn’t need his help anyway. It’s just taking him a while to re-orient himself with reality, lying there on his back with his hole exposed and stinging and his shirt twisted up over his ribs because Flip is a pervert who has a thing for Gabriel’s nipples: twisting them, licking them, sucking them. Or just staring at them when they’re exposed. They’re still hard, mostly from the cold creeping in. It’s already early evening from the look of it; the lamps lining the street are all coming to life one by one. A car whizzes by, honking its horn and propelling them into action.

Gabriel grabs his jeans and pulls them up his hips. His knees shake and his ass is so fucking sore. He can’t walk straight without limping. Jesus, Flip really worked him hard. His hole feels strange now that’s empty and clenching on nothing. He has to lean against the wall to keep himself upright. He looks at Flip with a raised eyebrow. Now he’s desperately craving a smoke.

At the same time, Gabriel wants nothing more than to drop dead from exhaustion and sleep for two whole days. He’d followed Richardson for the same amount of time and could barely sleep while he tailed him. Gabriel remembers his eyes: a pale watery blue and maybe they were kind eyes but he doesn’t know that; he doesn’t know anything. To him he’s just a job. It’s just business. No hard feelings.

“You calm now?” Gabriel asks, handing Flip his belt.

Flip accepts it with a nod of thanks, sliding it on and then tucking his dick back in his jeans, discarding the condom with a careless flick. It sticks to the brick wall for a second before sliding down with a graceless plop, lost among the detritus of fast food wrappers and bits of newspaper littering the alley.

A cat slips by, yowling as it upsets a garbage lid and sends it wheeling across the alley.

“Yeah sure,” Flip says, then blinks and looks away, licking his bottom lip. “I guess.” He gestures to Gabriel who’s still clutching the wall like he might topple any moment because he just suddenly turned into a princess. “You all right?”

“You only fucked me in an alley until I couldn’t stand anymore,” Gabriel snorts. “Come here and carry me to my apartment.”

Flip looks like he’s about to do just that so Gabriel swats him on the arm. “Jesus, I’m joking Flip. I’m all right. I’ll be fine; I’ve had worse, don’t worry about it.”

“What does that even mean you’ve had worse.”

Gabriel shrugs.

“You say it like I make a habit of getting fucked in an alley.”

“Wouldn’t put it past you,” Flip says, but Gabriel doesn’t smile.

Nonetheless, Flip offers his arm: solid, reliable. His other arm slides tentatively around Gabriel’s waist, loose but still weird, like a hug. Gabriel doesn’t do hugs, doesn’t think they serve a particular purpose, like kissing, but he understands that for some people it brings comfort. It’s just another thing to file away. This is what happens when you touch a hot stove. This is the recoil of a gun. This is Flip, who fucks like a porn star and kisses all his one night stands.

“I didn’t, you know,” Flip asks, eyes widening meaningfully. “Hurt you, did I?”

“No,” Gabriel says, and has to shove Flip half-heartedly because he’s being ridiculous, but they lean on each other out of the alleyway, then the rest of the way to Gabriel’s building. “I don’t mind that it hurts a little. It feels good. When it hurts. You know?”

Flip swallows visibly, but his face is an empty mask, hard to read. There are little crows feet wrinkling the corners of his eyes and the two deep lines in his forehead age him beyond his years. But his cheeks dimple when he smiles and Gabriel’s seen this firsthand, spending all his time watching Flip from across the bar: laughing, moving.

“You still got blood on you,” Flip tells him, staring at the same spot on his cheek, looking, for all intents and purposes, like he wants to touch Gabriel again but isn’t sure if he should. Man’s got self-preservation skills after all and can take a hint.

“Thanks,” Gabriel says and does nothing about the blood at all.

* * *

In between jobs, Gabriel indulges in a new past time which is to say he follows Flip around town. Just for a few days. How it happens is by accident. He sees Flip across the street accompanied by a pretty brunette and instead of turning left to go see the butcher, he follows them all the way to a restaurant. If he were a better person, and perhaps more well-adjusted, he would have left them alone. Being none of those things, he has no compunction tailing them to their destination. He leaves a wide berth between himself and the two of them at all times, keeping his head down so they don’t see him, ducking behind people and alleyways and blending into the crowd.

The restaurant is a nice one, the kind you take someone to on a first date. It’s Wednesday evening. The place is full but Gabriel manages to snag a seat with a perfect view of Flip and his date. She’s pretty. Dresses like a school teacher, her hair neat as a pin like her lipstick. Strong nose but full lips. She’s probably a librarian. She seems nice.

They ask each other questions and it occurs to Gabriel that maybe this is a first date. He’s a couple of tables away, close enough to hear snippets of their conversation, and Flip’s back is to him as he starts to tell his date mundane little details about his job. The crappy hours, the shit pay, how long he’s been working as a detective (close to two years). He used to be a patrol officer, but he worked his way up. Took him ten years to get where he is now and he still sometimes has to share a desk with another detective who keeps taking all his pens. He plans to be a police captain before forty, which is a previously unheard of pursuit as most captains are seasoned and well into their fifties.

Flip has been meaning to quit smoking but has been relapsing every six months mostly because 90% of the people in his department are smokers. He doesn’t have any siblings which is why his bubbe keeps sending him on dates with nice Jewish girls — the daughter of a friend of her hairdresser’s cousin, something or other. He needs to settle down, she tells him, but Flip hasn’t been in a relationship in years and doesn’t go on dates, generally. Hazards of the job because of the crazy hours, and he laughs about it as if that’s somehow funny, but Gabriel knows better. He knows a thing or two about what Flip wants. Flip fucked him in an alley after all.

Eventually, the dessert arrives but Flip doesn’t eat any of it. When he walks his date down the street, he keeps his hands in his pockets. He flags her a cab and she tells him she had a nice night and then gives him a small kiss on the cheek that takes him off guard.

Flip is still standing in the street long after the cab pulls away from the curb. Gabriel doesn’t follow him home.

* * *

Gabriel doesn’t follow Flip home but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t follow him around a few days later, notching the details of his monotonous routine on his belt.

Flip goes out for a run every morning. He buys a bagel and a coffee from the deli across the police station, takes his coffee black with two sugars and his bagel with a smear of cream cheese. Sometimes he eats breakfast in the parking lot of the police station, smoking two cigarettes one after the other while going over the morning reports. He does his laundry on Wednesdays, in the only laundromat in town still open after hours that’s situated between a Chinese general store and what used to be pharmacy but is now just covered in boarded up plywood. He lives alone in an apartment that used to belong to his paternal grandfather with a window facing east that has a broken latch. As far as being a detective goes, he’s actually pretty decent, putting a couple dozen people behind bars on his two year stint.

Gabriel should be careful around him but Flip seems to be more interested in pinning him against walls than throwing him in the slammer so he doesn’t really worry about it.

On Saturdays, Flip goes to Larry’s as part of some kind of covert operation Gabriel has yet to figure out. Flip’s clothing choices are completely his own however, and not some attempt to seem inconspicuous. Still, Gabriel thinks he could do better.

He has Flip’s schedule memorized that he can recite it from memory. Which is why it takes him by surprise to see Flip’s car parked outside his apartment building on a Thursday. Flip goes to visit his bubbe on Thursdays. She’s one of the only two relatives still alive that he speaks to. The rest live out of state.

“Gabriel,” Flip says, no hello whatsoever as he steps out of the car.

Gabriel raises his eyebrows at him in acknowledgement. He has two armfuls of groceries: the ingredients for potato stew and a corn salad as well as the rest of the week’s meals. He’s getting the hang of cooking instead of ordering out lately now that he’s living alone and can’t rely on his bed fellows to make the meals. It’s good doing something without thinking, even better that he’s doing it for himself .

“Hey,” Gabriel says to Flip as he approaches.

Gabriel starts walking faster, but Flip catches up to him anyway, matching him stride for stride. He grabs his elbow gently.

“Detective Zimmerman, are you following me?” Gabriel says, letting his eyes drop all sultry and sweet. He shrugs the hand off.

Flip just scoffs at him and shakes his head.

At the very least, Gabriel knows how to feign innocence but it seems Flip isn’t buying his bullshit. Not today, anyway.

“I know you were in my apartment,” Flip tells him, “You’re not exactly very subtle.”

Gabriel grins. “Your bed’s kind of comfy,” he muses. He’d rolled around in it, spending over an hour in Flip’s apartment picking up things and putting them back wherever he sees fit just to rattle him a little: his socks in the kitchen drawer, his allergy medication in the fridge. His laundry from the den all neatly folded on the bed which took Gabriel half an hour to get done. Flip’s closet is a mess, various permutations of the same color and pattern. He owns at least three other flannel shirts that look exactly alike. He’s a hopeless case. No wonder no one wants to date him. Jesus.

“You know I’ve been meaning to ask,” Gabriel says conversationally, “Where’d you get your mattress? My back’s been killing me for months, it’s crazy. But your bed…” he whistles. “It’s like you’re sleeping on a cloud. Must cost a ton of money, huh?”

“It’s just memory foam,” Flip says, lip twitching.

Gabriel smiles. “Right. So how was your uh…” He trails off long enough to seem like he’s trying to recall something. Then his smile widens. “How was your date?”

The shift in Flip’s expression is subtle but noticeable, quickly smoothing away as Flip regards him with another patented glare. “Did you follow her too?” he asks.

Gabriel shrugs, makes a face. He thought about it briefly, but contrary to popular belief he doesn’t have a lot of free time these days. He’s waiting on the wings for a job, and though he’s working lesser hours at Larry’s on account of Larry hiring part-time staff, tailing Flip everywhere has been an all consuming monster. There’s only so many hours he could devote to stalking a person whose idea of a good time is hosting Sunday barbecues for his cop friends. He can’t be bothered following someone else.

“You can relax, Zimmerman. She’s not interesting enough to me though you probably think the same seeing as you didn’t call her again and ask her out on a second date. Didn’t know you were Jewish though. I guess the necklace you wear should have been a clue. Also that thing about your uh…” He drops his gaze deliberately to Flip’s crotch. “Dick,” he chuckles. “But I guess there’s lots you don’t find out about a person unless you sit down with them and talk.”

Flip looks at him like maybe he’s crazy, and he’s right. Gabriel is insane, on the side of uncomfortably deranged.

“Does your bubbe know you’re a queer?” he asks, the final nail on the coffin.

Flip grabs him by the front of the shirt, shaking him once, twice, like a malfunctioning toy, his face livid like he wants to either punch Gabriel on the mouth or kiss him there on the street with everyone watching.

“Leave her out of this, Gabriel. I could arrest you for breaking and entering. Hell, I could arrest you for ten different things you did before you moved here. Think I don’t know about Hell’s Kitchen? I did my research, asked around. You one of the O’Malley’s, huh? The son?”

Gabriel waits before responding. He has an armful of groceries, sure, but he can still feel the perfect weight of a pocket knife in his jacket pocket. He’s not a violent person, but he can be when provoked. He likes to punch people when he’s angry; he likes to punch them really hard. He offers Flip a thin smile instead. “Well color me impressed Detective Zimmerman. Aren’t you just full of surprises?”

Flip says nothing, but he does relinquish his grip on Gabriel’s shirt when Gabriel slides his hands over his knuckles to squeeze them in a show of tenderness. He leaps at least a foot away when Gabriel makes as if to kiss him, as if there weren’t worse places on Gabriel’s body Flip’s mouth had been. Flip and his silly machismo.

Gabriel laughs, picking up his groceries from the ground. The fruits have bruised but everything else has come out unscathed. He’s glad he forgot to buy the eggs. Gabriel turns to open the door of his building then holds it ajar with the weight of his shoulder. “I’m making potato stew for dinner. Wanna come up? Consider it an apology of sorts.”

When Flip doesn’t budge, Gabriel adds, “I’ll even let you fuck me after we do the dishes. Or before, depending on how I’m feeling.” He grins, all teeth and playful intent and laughs again when Flip takes his grocery bags from him, grumbling something he doesn’t quite catch.

“Jesus, you’re a fucking asshole,” Flip swears but he follows Gabriel up the stairs anyway and into his apartment. Of course he does.

* * *

Gabriel makes good on his promise to let Flip fuck him but the dishes haven’t even put away yet before they’re stumbling into the bedroom, shedding a trail of clothes along the way. Gabriel takes the initiative and tugs Flip over to the bed by the belt, pulling him flush on top of him as soon as his back hits the mattress. He’s feeling generous so tonight he actually lets Flip kiss him instead of making a big deal out of it. He doesn’t mind getting felt up either, rolling his hips forward and squirming as Flip’s hands stroke up his sides.

Gabriel’s undershirt has ridden up high enough to expose his chest. He can feel a glance of cool air making his skin pebble in goosebumps. Flip pauses kissing his mouth so he could focus his attention elsewhere, namely the stiff nubs of Gabriel’s nipples which he takes into his mouth one at a time while rubbing Gabriel’s dick through his pants.

Gabriel is desperate for it by the time Flip starts prepping him with two fingers. He’d used too much lube so now there are smears of it shining in patches on his thighs where the light hits it. He feels wet, open, and Flip doesn’t have to tell him to hook his legs on his shoulders because he’s already doing it himself.

Except.

“Shit,” Gabriel hisses when Flip starts fumbling through the dresser drawer. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Flip looks at him over his shoulder. “What? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t have any condoms,” he says, because of course he used them all up the last few times Flip came around to fuck him. “Do you?”

“No. I didn’t plan this,” Flip snorts which could be said for half of their trysts.

“Right,” Gabriel mutters, stark naked and shaking and very much needing a rough and thorough pounding. He flings an arm over his heated face, letting out a low noise of impatience. His legs are spread wide, his dick and hole exposed, and he can feel the slow drip of lube down the inside of his thigh, starting to cool.

“Are you clean?” he says.

“What, what do you mean?” Flip says, and then understanding dawns and his face changes. “Of course I’m clean. I don’t sleep around.” When Gabriel gives him a look, he amends that with, “I mean not with anyone else.”

“Good boy,” Gabriel says, and then urges Flip forward with a foot. “Fuck me then.”

“What? But I don’t—”

“I may spread my legs like at a two-bit whore Zimmerman but I’m clean, trust me,” Gabriel tells him. “Fuck me,” he repeats a little more firmly, “Or I’ll sit on your dick and do it myself.”

Flip just laughs hoarsely and pushes in. It feels strange without the condom on, better even, Gabriel hyper-aware of every hot inch of Flip’s dick until his balls are pressed tight against Gabriel’s ass.

Flip starts a quick, rough rhythm that has Gabriel tipping his head back, breathing hard and losing himself into it, feeling every part of his body flush to the root of his hair. He meets Flip’s eyes like this is some kind of challenge, and Flip kisses him again with an open mouth, fucks into him so deep Gabriel’s cock spurts out a drops of pre-come.

“Oh,” Gabriel sighs. “Oh, oh god, god, god, fuck, fuck,” and then he’s completely incoherent, his words changing to breathy moans, his hips jerking erratically despite Flip’s steady movements. Flip rolls them over so that Gabriel is on top, straddling his hips while his hole is perfectly speared open on Flip’s cock.

Gabriel rides him hard until both their eyes are rolling back in their sockets. He jerks his cock in time with every downward cant of his hips, meanwhile Flip fucks up into him and bounces him up and down his cock like a rag doll. Gabriel orgasms with a sudden jolt when Flip fills up his ass with a hot rush of come he isn’t expecting and then the pulsing stops and it’s just Flip, his breath hot on Gabriel’s neck, his eyes closed, whispering against his skin.

There’s silence in Gabriel’s head for a minute after that, nothing but the darkness behind his eyes, and the smooth hot skin of Flip’s shoulder against his lips, and the tickle of his hair against his face, and his fingers drumming up his spine. His dick slips out of Gabriel’s ass, unplugging a slow trickle of come from Gabriel’s hole.

Flip is still holding him, one arm around Gabriel’s waist while his other hand drifts lazily south. Sometimes Gabriel forgets how big Flip really is and overestimates the structural capacity of his own ass.

He squirms when Flip starts playing with the come in his hole. It’s a weird feeling, all that lube combined with rapidly cooling spend. Then Flip jostles him a little, causing Gabriel to blink one bleary eye open in annoyance.

“What?” he grouses.

Flip is staring at Gabriel’s neck. He fingers the star of David dangling from a chain around it and gives it a gentle tug, pressing the metal between his thumb and forefinger. “I was looking for this,” he says, meeting Gabriel’s eyes knowingly.

“Finders keepers,” Gabriel tells him.

* * *

Then Gabriel gets shot. That isn’t the problem as he’s been shot before a dozen different times. The problem is that he’s not in New York City when this happens which means the family doctor is not so close at hand. Gabriel doesn’t even notice the bleeding until after he gets home, rifling through the contents of his fridge to pull out a Corona. That he’s been shot and hadn’t managed to dodge it in time takes him by surprise more than the flaring pain that suddenly asserts itself where the bullet had grazed him, there on the meat of his upper arm. He only just notices the blood seeping through and darkening his sleeve “Shit,” he says, and puts away the Corona.

He doesn’t have a first aid kit so he makes do with a wad of paper towels. He wraps a makeshift tourniquet around his bicep comprised of an old shirt he digs out the bottom of his closet. Blood oozes through the material when he flexes his arm to test for pain.

That’s how Flip finds him, half an hour later, sitting in the living room drinking beer with a bloody arm. Because the lock on the door still isn’t fixed, he just breezes in, stopping a few feet from Gabriel when he notices his injury. It’s eight in the evening. He’d just finished his shift. Gabriel knows this on account of his familiarity with Flip’s schedule. He only comes around on a good day, when he wants a fuck to cap off the week.

“What happened?” he says, face blanching, halfway into taking off his jacket and hanging it up. “Shit, Gabriel. You’re hurt. You should get that looked at.”

“You think?” Gabriel says. He’s mostly fine, but the bleeding is annoying and so is the searing pain. He wanted to make dinner, but the wound is in his dominant arm, limiting his range of motion. “I can take care of myself. Don’t need a doctor.”

“I can see that,” Flip says skeptically. “You’re bleeding all over the couch.”

Gabriel glances down at himself, realizing Flip is right. He feels oddly detached from what’s happening, as if he’s seeing it happen to someone else or just doesn’t give a shit. When he comes to, Flip is dragging him by his good arm out the door, succeeding in prying him off the couch at least.

“Come on, don’t be a stubborn ass,” he sags, squeezing Gabriel by the elbow. “I know somebody.”

“Oh, I’ve heard that one before,” Gabriel laughs. And it never ends well, Gabriel thinks, at least from his experience. That’s why he had gotten shot today. Morello and his enemies, who’d cornered him in a deserted street before succumbing to the bullet Gabriel lodged in their brains. Morello had wanted a clean kill but his list of enemies is a mile wide with new ones getting in line.

“Yeah, well, you haven’t met my somebody,” Flip says, grabbing a jacket behind the door to throw on him. “He’s the real deal, trust me.”

Flip takes him to his cousin who lives fifteen minutes away without traffic. They pull up into a nice neighborhood, with the kind of picturesque views slapped on the front of postcards. Flip nudges him out the door of the passenger seat with a light shove and Gabriel blinks awake, surprised to learn he’d fallen asleep. He’s a little annoyed at himself for that. First, he gets shot. Now he’s letting a cop grab him by the elbow and take him to someone else’s apartment. For all he knows this is some covert attempt at an arrest.

Then up they go three flights of stairs, turning left to a cramped hallway before knocking on a door marked 201. A young man with a riot of curly hair, brightest eyes and Flip’s nose answers the door. He’s wearing a faded USCC t-shirt and blue scrubs.

“Phillip,” he says, concerned, as soon as the door opens. “Is it bubbe?”

“No, bubbe’s fine, but I’ve got a friend here who needs your help.”

Later Gabriel will try to examine what Flip means by friend, because they’re not friends in the strictest sense of the word, him and Flip. But maybe they sort of are with Flip’s increasing number of visits to his apartment and Flip being the kind of person he doesn’t mind spending his time with while his legs are open. Gabriel has friends, and then he has _friends_ and Flip is somewhere in there straddling the line between the two. Gabriel made him dinner after all and hasn’t tried to kill him yet which should be something at least. That’s the best definition of a friend he can think of: someone he can sleep in the same room with without having to reach for his gun during some point in the night. Or maybe Flip is just much too straight-laced to betray him, until Gabriel gives him reason to. He laughs at the word, straight-laced.

Flip looks at him like he’s delirious. Maybe he is.

Shiloh is Flip’s cousin, a medical intern with steady hands. He crouches in front of Gabriel, unwraps the strips of shirt from his arm to disinfect the wound with antiseptic. He’s lucky it’s just a graze though it tore skin and left a pretty deep cut. He’s had worse. Shiloh patches him up with strips of gauze and directions to change the dressing every so often to lower the risk of infection.

Gabriel just looks at him mildly. “It’s not my first rodeo.”

Shiloh glances up at Flip. They share a wordless look. “Right,” he says.

“Thanks, doc.” Gabriel gives Shiloh a salute before standing to his feet. Flip pulls him back down on the couch, and once Shiloh is out of earshot, hisses, “You wanna tell me what happened?”

“Nah,” Gabriel says, patting around his pockets for a cigarette, frowning when nothing materializes. “Am perfectly fine with you not knowing. You want me to incriminate myself or something?”

“If I wanted you arrested, you wouldn’t be walking the streets right now.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No. What?” Flip sighs. “Why the hell would I threaten you?”

“You’re a shitty detective, then. Putting your own selfish interests before the safety of civilians, all for a piece of ass.”

Flip says nothing in response. He’s trying to pull on a stern expression, but the corner of his mouth is starting to twitch. Maybe in anger, maybe in amusement.

“Did you do something,” Flip says.

“Why do you always assume it’s my fault?” Gabriel says. “Maybe I was cleaning my gun when it went off. You don’t know that.”

“I doubt you’d be so careless.”

“You’d be surprised.” Gabriel huffs. “I’m sleeping with the enemy aren’t I?”

When Shiloh returns to the room with cans of beer to hand them both, Gabriel is grateful for the distraction. He’s discomfited by Flip’s concern for his general wellbeing and safety. Part of what he likes about Flip is that he seems perfectly content not to pry into Gabriel’s past as if he already knows all there is to know about him and they’re just moving forward. Once and only once he asks Gabriel why he left New York. Gabriel doesn’t answer him. There’s a lot to of luggage to unpack and history to unravel and memories to relive like images on a zoetrope. The past should stay in the past where it belongs.

Flip has yet to earn the right to interrogate him on his activities whether he’s doing it out of genuine concern or a habit born of his job. Cops do tend to be so fucking nosy.

Flip acts like he has dirt on Gabriel but has never once acted on it. Gabriel is starting to believe that it’s all empty threats. All Flip knows at this point is probably hearsay. There are no official arrest records. A couple times Gabriel got pulled over for speeding and that’s pretty much it, because the NYPD can be bribed into doing anything including letting an intoxicated felon go overnight.

“So how do you two know each other?” Shiloh asks, hunkering down in the armchair across from them. “You a cop too?” he gestures to Gabriel amiably.

“Yes,” Flip lies, at the exact same time Gabriel replies, “No, what? Me? A cop?”

Shiloh just clears his throat awkwardly, takes a chug of his beer.

Flip does the same a second later, a perfect echo of Shiloh’s actions except he empties his before putting it down and wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt. “It’s a long story,” he says, and casts a sidelong glance at Gabriel he doesn’t bother hiding.

Gabriel ignores it. “You wouldn’t want to hear it,” he agrees.

“So I guess that’s my cue not to ask questions then. Ha,” says Shiloh, glancing between the both of them before turning his attention to the bowl of peanuts on the coffee table, nervously scooping out a palmful that he chews like an anxious squirrel.

Gabriel shoots Flip a look of pure awe and delight. “See? He can read an atmosphere. You my friend not so much.”

“Are you two dating?” Shiloh blurts out.

“What? Fuck.” Flip glares at him then at Gabriel. “I’m not— he’s a guy—”

Gabriel starts laughing, slapping his knee. “I love dick as much as the next guy but no, I don’t date, we’re not dating. And if I did date, I won’t be dating cops.”

“Yeah, you just fuck em,” Flip mumbles, loud enough that only Gabriel can hear. Sometimes, Flip is just asking to be stabbed in the gut. It’s too bad he’s got a handsome face. Gabriel can smother him in his sleep but he’d rather just sit on that gorgeous fucking mug instead and choke him in other more nefarious ways, like with his ass or his dick. The drawback to that is this constant stream of minor annoyances, like Flip showing up unannounced like clockwork, coming to him when his dick and his ego need stroking. Or the fact he considers them friends.

“I’m not judging!” Shiloh tells them in a way that sounds suspect because he probably is at least to some degree judging them. He’s sweet. “But it’s not everyday you bring a friend to meet me!”

“He was bleeding and didn’t want to go to a hospital,” Flip points out. “That kind of narrows down my options.”

“I thought I was your favourite cousin,” Shiloh says.

“You’re my only cousin,” Flip reminds him.

“Well, I’d hate to break up this family reunion but I really gotta go.” Gabriel stands to excuse himself and is surprised when Flip stands along with him, grabbing his jacket. “Thanks for the medical advice, doc. I guess I’ll see you around.”

He turns to leave, but Shiloh runs to the bedroom and returns with a kit of medical supplies, the logo of the hospital he must be working for printed on the front of the bag. It’s a bit much, but then again Gabriel has concluded that about the Zimmermans. They are in general a bit too much. A man can only stomach them for short bursts at a time, any more and it gets on the nerves.

“I’ll see you,” Gabriel says to Shiloh with a nod, and doesn’t say anything when Flip follows him down the stairs and opens the passenger side of the car for him. What a gentleman. Gabriel just gives him a disbelieving look before strapping himself in and letting Flip pick the music as he drives them back to Gabriel’s apartment where he’ll no doubt berate Gabriel and ply him with a thousand questions just to see if he’ll cave. And if he’s in a giving mood, maybe he’ll give Gabriel a proper fucking like Gabriel needs more than medicine at the moment. It’s been a long day, and he has all this leftover adrenaline he doesn’t know what to do with.

Killing makes his blood hot, knowing he’s been successful makes it hotter. At the end of the day, sometimes all a man needs is a beer and a good orgasm. Gabriel’s already had two beers. Now he needs just the other one.

* * *

Gabriel lays low after that botched job. He tells Morello he needs time to heal, which is only half true because he’s used to pain. The real reason behind it is that he feels like he’s only slightly out of shape and needs a time out to retrain his reflexes. It’s been over eight years since he last got shot. Before that it was because he was cocky or careless. Now he that he’s older and out of practice, carelessness can cause him his life. He’s seen it happened to more season veterans. He doesn’t want to be digging his own grave.

When Gabriel gets the payout for the Morello job that nearly costs him an arm, he uses it to put a downpayment on a used car— not as sleek or as fast as the one he had in New York, but dependable: a Gremlin that’s at least nine years old with a hatchback and a white racing stripe over a deep blue finish. There are worst cars to drive but the thing is on sale, and Gabriel really needs to find ways to get around if this thing with Morello is going to be a sure gig. He hates taking public transport, has to pack a bag full of fresh clothes and ammunition every time he’s required to go out of state. There’s also the question of garbage bags.

If he had a car, he can just get keep a handful of them in the glove compartment instead of buying some from a convenience store hours before a kill. The backseat of the Gremlin is spacious enough for a full grown adult, granted their body was hacked up to separate pieces and put in a bag. All in all, it’s a justifiable purchase. It’s ugly enough that people won’t suspect it, and flashy enough that it’s just a little bit Gabriel’s style.

The first thing he does with his newfound freedom is to drive to Flip’s bubbe’s house. She lives halfway across town, in the house she grew up in, because she refuses to be sent to a nursing home. Her home is at the very end of a long tree-lined street with a wraparound porch and windows painted canary yellow. She’s eighty-three years old and has enrolled herself in a bridge class that meets at the public library every Friday at 3pm.

Gabriel rings the doorbell, pretending to ask around for Flip, introduces himself as a friend. And good old bubbe Zimmerman, bless her heart, invites him in and asks him if he wants some tea while he waits for her grandson. She cuts him a slice of whiskey cake that she still has sitting in the fridge. She made it last week for Phillip. It’s his favourite.

“You seem like a sweet boy,” she says admiringly, sitting in her favourite stuffed armchair with the floral print.“Is my Phillip doing okay? He tends to work himself to the ground, you know. Sometimes, I worry about him. He doesn’t have a lot of friends outside of work. You said you’re not from the police station?”

“No,” Gabriel says, smiling at her, “I’m not ma’am.” He doesn’t give her more than that though she’s clearly waiting for him to elaborate. Gabriel drinks his tea and gets up to study the contents of her mantel: framed pictures of her family, faces that look familiar on a physical level (the nose, the eyes, those damn moles), some old, some fairly recent. There’s one of Flip at ten years old blowing (or in this case wrestling) a trombone.

Bubbe Zimmerman laughs when she sees Gabriel staring at it. He won’t mistake those eyes anywhere. Flip had been an awkward child, long-limbed and big-nosed. “I thought he was going to be a musician, we all did,” she says, getting up on her cane and shuffling over to him. She smells like a combination of must and moth balls, but it’s fine and Gabriel doesn’t mind. Something about it is comforting like finding a book you thought you’d lost long ago or sitting inside listening to it rain.

“He was very artistic. Liked to draw and paint and dance. Not like other boys, you know? Kept to himself most of the time. Then in high school he joined track.” She smiles to herself, lost in thought, then up at him briefly before squatting awkwardly next to the coffee table where a massive photo album lives underneath. She pulls it out with a heave, then slams it onto the coffee table with a thud. Dust rises up in plumes; there’s a film of cobwebs coating the worn cover. She holds back a sneeze.

It’s the family fucking tree, Gabriel thinks in delight, and has to hold back a smirk.

“There’s plenty more here,” she tells him, wiping the album with the end of her knitted shawl. “Lots from when he joined the army. He wasn’t the same after that. He—”

The phone rings, jolting her mid-sentence and making her clutch at her chest. They look at each other. The phone rings again, again.

She sighs, rolling her eyes. “I’ll be just a minute,” she promises, patting him on the hand. Her skin is papery, the veins visible. Halfway down the hall where the phone is installed into the wall, she turns and says, “Now don’t be shy and eat a bite of that cake. There’s plenty more in the fridge. It’s an old family recipe. The secret is lots of butter!”

She cackles as if that’s somehow funny and Gabriel can’t help but smile back. As soon as her back is turned, the smile fades and he pulls the photo album into his lap. It’s heavy, the front cover yellowed and worn. Gabriel’s first instinct is to look inside it. He wants to. If there are horribly embarrassing photos of Flip with a mushroom bowl cut or in a first grade pageant dressed as a tree, he sure as hell wants to know about it. But he hesitates, for a long time. Dimly, he hears bubbe Zimmerman talking to someone on the phone. An old friend by the sound of it, or maybe a relative, as she starts speaking in rappid Yiddish, gesturing wildly.

It’s 5:10. Flip is due any minute to arrive. Gabriel takes his leave and takes a hunk of the whiskey cake with him, slipping out the front door quietly. He eats the cake on his way home, driving one-handed back to the apartment and getting crumbs all over his shirt and the driver seat.

Bubbe Zimmerman said the secret to whiskey cake was lots of butter but there’s a sharp tang that clings to his teeth. He’s still wondering what it is hours later while he’s looking over the notes Morello sent him for the next job. A phone number, an address, a timeline. He doesn’t work for Morello, he’s a go-between for Gabriel’s real clients, the ones with the whole city in their pocket, but Morello’s his ticket in if he wants to keep getting work. Some people don’t want to risk the possibility of exposure and that’s acceptable and all very fine but what’s not is Morello keeping him on a very short leash. He thinks Gabriel isn’t warranted a day off. Which means if Gabriel wants to get paid, he better get his act together and follow the job to New York.

New York, where he hasn’t been for nearly a year. New York which he’s put behind him because there aren’t any new dreams and he’s already made peace with that. He asks for another week, makes up a bogus story about needing to be out of state for a family emergency and Morello gives him three days tops. His arm will have healed completely by then, but that’s not why Gabriel isn’t keen on going.

* * *

Flip accosts him at the gym a few days later. Gabriel has signed up for boxing classes. Just to keep sharp. It’s been a while since he’d seen hand to hand combat. When it comes to jobs, he likes to be efficient. Guns are the fastest way to kill a person, knives a second option when he runs out of bullets though it’s more trouble than it’s worth because people are finicky and tend to run when they see you wielding a knife and headed their direction. So: guns it is, but he doesn’t want to get the shit beat out of him and have a repeat of last time when Flip’s buddies from the Klan thought it was a good idea to kick him around like a football.

Gabriel still hasn’t forgiven them for that but he won’t be wasting any bullets on them. It’s not worth the time, and anyway he can always just rig their cars with explosives. Maybe, but he doesn’t have the resources or connections he once had, and getting anything mailed to him that isn’t a package full of sweaters for the long winter ahead is going to be a pain. Choices, choices. If they disappeared, maybe Flip would get more time off work.

The boxing class is for beginners but Gabriel holds his own. He’s seen his fair share of action, on the field through the trenches, but also in less legitimate pursuits. His experiences are many and varied.

When he was sixteen and scrawny and always looking for a fight, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders like something out of a Salinger novel, his ass was constantly handed to him. Skinny guy like him who people often took for granted, but he kept getting up for more because he wanted to prove something. His father and Little Jackie called it different things: stubbornness (his father), resilience (Little Jackie). His mom said it was just plain reckless and stupid and thwacked him on the head with a rolled up newspaper before taking out the first aid kid.

It’s half an hour before closing when Flip shows up to wreak havoc at the gym, or as much havoc as a closeted Jewish man in the police force can, which means he just stands there to the side menacingly hoping to intimidate Gabriel at a distance.

Gabriel is easy to find or at least he makes himself easy to find, moving within Flip’s radius so there can be no mistaking his intent. Flip may not know it but they share a barber now as well as a butcher, both veritable wells of information on matters concerning him. It’s a small town, easy enough for them to get caught in each other’s orbit, but Gabriel signing up for boxing classes at the same gym Flip goes to lift weights on the weekends is no accident. The man teaching the class is a friend of Flip’s with a wallet full to bursting with pictures of his children. Gabriel keeps getting their names mixed up, because all children look the same to him, but he gets the instructor’s name right the first try: Harry.

“There’s someone looking for you,” Harry says, ducking through the ropes of the boxing ring to excuse himself. He walks backwards, disappearing through the door lining the west wall. As it’s half an hour before closing, there’s no one else around: just Gabriel, Flip, and the feeble hum of the air conditioning unit.

Flip is walking towards Gabriel. He slips a pair of gloves onto his hands and holds them up near his head. He looks like he’s come from work: just in jeans and a flannel shirt. His shoes are not made for sparring.

“My bubbe says hi,” he says, the same time Gabriel delivers a solid kick to the glove, his ankle hitting it with a resounding slap and just barely missing Flip’s nose.

Flip startles, but his face quickly smoothes out into a neutral expression. “That’s not part of the rules, is it.”

Gabriel smiles at him evenly. “I never play by them.”

Flip doesn’t rise to the bait, which is only half as fun now. “You mind telling me why how bubbe knows you?”

“She’s such a nice lady,” Gabriel says, sidestepping the question. This is, however, a genuine opinion, whether or not Flip chooses to believe it. The house had smelled like old books and potpourri, had windows that looked like sleepy eyes. The first time Gabriel had snuck inside while Flip’s bubbe was out doing the groceries, he checked every room including the attic. There were pictures of her late husband everywhere. Her fridge was full of colorful things in jars: jams, homemade ointments for aches and pains. And she pickled everything.

“I swear to god if you hurt her O’Malley I’m gonna—”

Gabriel rolls his eyes and goes for Flip’s ribs, but Flip grabs his wrist and pushes his hand backward to drive him to the ground. He has a foot planted in Gabriel’s back, ready to slam down then asks, politely, “Are you stalking her too? Do you think this is funny?”

Gabriel starts to laugh. He doesn’t mean to, but it rushes out of him while his cheek is squashed agains the dirty mat, hair hanging sweaty over his eyes. He laughs and laughs for a good half minute, shoulders shaking from the strength of it. This is why he often got into trouble as a kid; he found the most inappropriate things funny. People falling down stairs, animals wearing fuzzy costumes. A man dying after Gabriel’s bullet had struck him straight in the ass. The human body in pain can be the most interesting thing.

“Gabriel,” Flip says again, this time a warning.

Gabriel sobers up, lets his body go limp and his breathing even out until the pressure of Flip’s foot eases on his back. He rolls over when Flip lets him, leaning up on his elbows. Then he shucks off his gloves and shakes his head.

“You have me,” he says, “Right where you want me.” He spreads his legs. Flip lets out a huff of disbelief.

Then, because Gabriel may not be the strongest in a roomful of people but has the advantage of speed, he exploits this little interval and punches Flip in the face. He does this out of habit, an ingrained tactic he learned while he was still in the army and taking on opponents that might outclass him, and abuses Flip’s known weakness, stepping heavily on his toes and going for his ankles. He sends him crashing to the mat with a sweep of a kick but Flip tackles Gabriel down and manages to pin him.

Gabriel grunts in surprise as his body hits the mats with a thud. Fip’s a lot heavier than him, but Gabriel has spent most of his life fighting heavier, bigger men. That’s the part that’s most fun, in his opinion, the part where people dismiss him out of hand solely because of his appearance. He digs his elbow into Flip’s ribs and pushes upwards, using the sinewy strength of his arms, but Flip pushes back down relentless, until Gabriel feels his elbows shake and give. He slumps on the mat and lets Flip hold him down with the strength and weight of his body. He’s doing this because he wants to, because he’s tired, because he’s been sparring with Harry for the better part of the afternoon and is ready to take down arms.

Flip is breathing heavily, expression hungry, dangerous. This what Gabriel likes about him, because when it comes down to it, even if they bat for opposite sides of the law, they’re made of the same sturdy stuff. Flip has a wildness about him that doesn’t realize. A mean, vicious streak buried under layers of midwestern charm and his aww shucks attitude. It’s there when he fucks Gabriel like Gabriel owes him his submission. It’s here now in the way he presses their bodies together: he wants Gabriel to yield, to him, always.

“Phillip Zimmerman,” Gabriel grins, bumping their crotches together. “Are you hard right now?”

Flip, to his credit, just stares him down. “You’d like that wouldn’t you?” he says, tone trying to pass off as disgusted when in fact it’s seeping heavy with lust. He’s not really hard, but Gabriel gets off riling him up if only to see him suffer and retaliate. “You’d like it if I took you here. Fucked you on your back with your ankles up on my shoulders. You wouldn’t care who saw us because you have no fucking shame.”

Gabriel smiles in sheer delight. “You think you know me well, don’t you detective?” he pats him on the cheek like a misbehaving child, rubs his thumb over the beginnings of stubble on his jaw, “But you’re right that about me: I don’t give a shit. I’d let you fuck me, here, anywhere. Doesn’t really matter. It would be so good, because getting dick is what I love best apart from pissing you off. You know it’s been a while since you paid me a visit. Lately, I’ve had to made do with my fingers. I use three, four if I’m feeling frisky ‘cause my fingers aren’t as big or as thick as yours. My poor little hole’s starting to get a little lonely. And you of all people know how I get when that happens.”

Flip growls in his ear, baring his teeth like an animal. Sometimes all it takes is a little nudge and he shows his true colors. He’s not as cookie cutter “You’re insane.”

“Am I?” Gabriel says.

“I won’t let you come,” Flip hisses, and it occurs to Gabriel that he’s playing along now too. His eyes are fixed on Gabriel’s face, unmoving, his body heavier as he lets his hands splay against Gabriel’s ribs, the warmth of his palms permeating through layers of thin cotton.

Gabriel shudders, arches up just the tiny bit so his shirt rides up. He feels the cotton slide just as Flip’s thumbs start moving to expose more skin. His nipples harden; his dick is the barest friction away from bursting in his shorts.

“I’ll keep you open with my fingers, with my tongue,” Flip says, knowing full well how the timber of his voice has an affect on Gabriel, “Eat you out till you’re all nice and wet. Push two fingers up inside you to get an even little stretch going. You like that. You love having anything up your ass, don’t you? Doesn’t matter what, just wanna get your little hole stuffed. But I won’t let you come, you’re not even gonna be allowed to touch yourself, Gabriel. When I do finally put my dick in you, it’s gonna be so good. You’ll feel me inside you for weeks. You wouldn’t even be able to stand without thinking about me.”

“So: the usual shit then,” Gabriel says, but his voice his hoarse and his dick is about to fall off. If Flip doesn’t make good on his promise anytime soon, he’ll shoot something, maybe himself. He’s so fucking hard, so fucking turned on. Because that’s the thing with Flip, he knows which buttons to push. If he weren’t such an upstanding lawman, Gabriel could have turned him into a complete hedonist. But he still has all these self-imposed rules for himself: things he will do, things he won’t. When Flip pulls himself up on his feet with more dignity than someone with a visible erection shoulder be able to muster, all the fight leaves Gabriel’s body and all he can do is just laugh in disbelief.

“What the fuck,” he says, his accent slipping just the tiniest bit. “Really? Oh, that’s such a dick move, detective. You gonna leave a man hanging?”

“Technically, lying on their back,” Flip tells him. Who gave him a sense of humor all of a sudden?

Gabriel gives him the finger and then heaves himself up on his elbows, which takes a great deal of effort with a raging erection while wearing breathable cotton shorts. “I’m not gonna hurt her,” he says, because Flip did make an effort to come out and see him after all and he might as well reassure him to put the matter to rest.

“She’s important to you,” Gabriel tells him, which is a lot more honest than he’d like but he’s still hoping Flip will touch him again, maybe if he’s feeling generous enough. “I can tell you’re important to her too. I wanted to look at that photo album of hers, bet you have some really interesting ones she saved up from the previous years.”

“Gabriel,” Flip warns, stepping forward.

“Do you ever wonder why I do it?”

“I’ve stopped wondering why you do what you do,” Flip says, voice even.

“Humor me.” Gabriel smiles at him thinly, holds an arm out, hand up, but Flip doesn’t take it. So Gabriel waits. He’s good at that: waiting, biding his time. “I’m curious about you, Phillip Zimmerman,” he continues, when there seems to be no response forthcoming. “You interest me.”

“Which you think gives you the permission to stalk me and my family,” Flip states, deadpan. “Right.”

“I have to admit that I’m a man who prefers an indirect approach,” Gabriel laughs, hand still in the air. He wiggles his fingers from pinky to thumb then back again.

Flip still doesn’t budge, still doesn’t help him up. “As opposed to what?”

“The straightforward approach which is to ask you out to dinner.”

“What,” Flip says, the disbelief palpable in his voice.

Gabriel grins, and seeing the opportunity, makes a grab for Flip’s hand to hoist himself up to his feet. When they stand toe to toe, Flip eases his grip, then takes a step back and then another. But he doesn’t leave the boxing ring, not yet.

“You’re real piece of work,” Flip says, shaking his head before slipping through the ropes, same way he came in.

Gabriel watches him leave, already counting the days when he’d come boomeranging back with his tail between his legs. Flip can be predictable like that.

* * *

They go on their date exactly four days later. Flip can’t hold out, but apparently, neither can Gabriel, because Gabriel shows up at Flip’s doorstep on one of his rare days off when he isn’t babysitting patrol officers whom he may or may not have fucked, or working undercover to build a case against his Klan buddies.

Gabriel has two tickets to a six-hour movie marathon at the cinema which will run the Creature from The Black Lagoon and it’s resulting sequels back to back for a full week straight. He manages to convince Flip to tag along the day before Gabriel has to leave for New York, which means Gabriel gave him a blowjob first to put him in an agreeable mood before dragging him forcibly out the door, clothed but half-rumpled. If it were up to Flip, they would be horizontal all Saturday long, not sitting in a theater where it’s dark and chilly like a cave and they’re completely alone. Flip has an enormous tub of popcorn in his lap; Gabriel has a soda in hand but he brought a flask of whiskey along to make it less bland.

Gabriel chose this particular stretch for precisely that reason. People are less likely to show up to an after lunch screening of The Creature from the Black Lagoon when there are better, funner venues for entertainment like the arcade or the mall or the nearby strip club. Anywhere is better than a rundown theater showing movies no one cares about anymore.

“Isn’t this fun?” Gabriel remarks, running his hands up and down the armrests. He used to leave gum under the seats and put his legs up to annoy others, but now that he’s older he’s more respectful of public spaces. As much as he can, Gabriel tries to work jobs in private. Death isn’t a spectacle, there shouldn’t be a whole song and dance about it. It’s as intimate as a prayer spoken in a confessional booth with few next to no witnesses, just God if he really existed and the perpetrator of your death.

“Fun?” Flip huffs. He lets his head roll back against the seat and sighs, blinking his eyes open and closed. “Jesus, I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”

“You promised,” Gabriel reminds him helpfully. “After I blew you on the couch, you’d said you’d do whatever I wanted. That you’re mine all afternoon.”

Flip may think Gabriel doesn’t see it, but there’s embarrassment staining his face. “I’ll say anything during sex. Half of it is just bullshit.”

“And the other half?” Gabriel asks.

Flip doesn’t answer. “I haven’t gone to the movies in a while,” he says after a moment, eyes trained forward.

“Yeah, your bubbe said you needed to get out more.”

“What?” Flip looks at him in the dark, eyes suspicious. “I thought you stopped hanging around her house?”

Gabriel rolls his eyes. “I did. She told me, that first time. She said you work too hard. I think she wants you to get yourself out there, maybe get a girlfriend, get married. Have kids. The whole schtick so she can kick the bucket in peace.” There were other things too that she didn’t have to tell Gabriel: that she was worried about Flip because his chosen profession was rife with risk, that she loved him even as a little boy who was artistic and musically inclined and not like others, that she got lonely sometimes in that little house at the end of the street and whenever Flip paid her a visit, it felt like she was with that same boy again, with the ears that stick out when his hair isn’t hiding them from view.

“When are you gonna tell her?” Gabriel asks. “About…you know.” He gestures vaguely at Flip. Gabriel has met closeted men before, and each time he puts them on an imaginary scale of closeted to not. Flip he has a problem putting a finger on, because sometimes he doesn’t care that their elbows brush occasionally when they walk side by side, but he also has the tendency to jerk away when Gabriel makes overt sexual comments, though that could easily be attributed to his reluctance to be involved with a known criminal.

“I don’t wanna break her heart,” Flip says.

Gabriel stares at the side of his face. “You think she’s gonna hate you when you tell her you like to suck cock?”

Flip glances at him, head whipping so fast his neck must hurt. “You think those kinds of jokes are funny?” he says heatedly.

Gabriel lifts his hands in a defense. “I’m just saying: she adores you. I don’t think she cares what you do in bed or who you do it with.”

“Is that why you introduced yourself?” Flip says, lips quirking in the ghost of a smirk or maybe it’s the tricks of the environment and Gabriel is just seeing what he wants to see. “To get on her good graces?”

“Old ladies love me,” Gabriel grins. “It’s the red hair, you know. And the cute ass. People find the combination irresistible.”

“It is cute,” Flip agrees, which startles a laugh out of Gabriel because Flip rarely if ever agrees with him on anything, even if Gabriel happens to be right which he so often is. Flip doesn’t elaborate on his comment, however, and lets it hang there in the air for Gabriel to decide what to make of it. Gabriel hazards a guess that it’s about his ass, though Flip is looking at him now quietly, his face weirdly soft under the bluish light of the movie.

“When did you know?”

“Hm?” Gabriel asks distractedly, gnawing on his plastic straw. “Oh, you mean, when I liked dick? Pretty young, though I was also interested in a few girls at the time. Mary Ann, from church. Then her brother Billy. It got really awkward after. I was in high school.”

“I tried it, you know,” he says, “With women.”

“And?” Gabriel presses.

Flip just shrugs. “I thought it would be— I don’t know. You know how when you’re a kid and you think there’s some things you’d learn how to do when you grow up? Like paying taxes or drinking coffee or knowing how to drive. It was like that for me. I thought it was something I’d grow into. Liking women, loving them.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Gabriel says, after a moment. “Or with you.” He tries to be reassuring, but he’s shit at that so he bumps the sides of their knees together instead.

Flip stares at their knees and bumps back tentatively. “Thanks,” he laughs awkwardly, glancing at him sidelong before scrubbing a hand through his face and tipping his head back. After a minute or so of shifting his head against the seat, he squints and makes a face, eyeing something in the distance. “Those kids back there are making out, practically on their way to having full blown sex. Jesus, I hate teenagers.”

“Oh, give them a break.” Now it’s Gabriel’s turn to laugh. He nudges Flip in the side with an elbow. “They’re just teenagers, old man. Let them have their fun. You were young once. Getting frisky in public spaces never hurt anybody.”

“Yeah, well, they shouldn’t be making out in a movie theater,” Flip says, still squinting and frowning, “It’s illegal and it’s rude.”

“I’ll show you rude—”Gabriel says, then slides a hand into Flip’s lap to knead at his crotch, sending popcorn flying everywhere when Flip starts to flail around.

Flip grabs his wrist, hissing. “Jesus— Gabriel!”

“Just turn it off! Jesus, fuck, do you ever turn it off?”

“Turn what off?”

“Your detective senses.” Gabriel rolls his eyes, throwing his arms up in frustration. “Does it tingle all the fucking time when someone does anything remotely illegal within a five mile radius? Must be hell on you to be with me. I’m as about illegal as you can possibly get.”

“You, I don’t have a problem with,” Flip says, offhand, unable to keep glancing over his shoulder suspiciously. How he can see in the dark remains a mystery, but maybe it’s one of those things young officers learn at the CSPD in addition to knowing the Miranda Rights by heart by the time they make their first arrest.

“Really,” says Gabriel flatly. “Me, when I carry an unlicensed firearm.”

“You’re not a threat,” Flip says, and he sounds like he genuinely believes it even if he keeps his head craned as if he can stop those teenagers from necking through the sheer strength of his glower alone.

“I’ve literally robbed a bank before,” Gabriel says, “And there was that one time, I stole actual candy from a baby just because I could.”

“Babies shouldn’t be eating candy, anyway. That’s just lousy parenting,” Flip says, and then there’s amusement in his eyes, shining just below the surface, making Gabriel smile back uncertainly because suddenly his stomach is doing this funny thing: it flips, a sensation he isn’t completely familiar with. He isn’t in grade school anymore, staring at the back of Kenny Thompson’s head, dreaming of recess and skinned knees and eating ice cream cones out on the front stoop of his apartment building. He’s an adult, thirty four fucking years old.

“So you’re not afraid of me,” Gabriel clarifies.

“No,” Flip says. “Why would I be? You wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“The gun’s an accessory,” Gabriel confirms, nodding. “I like it because it makes my dick look big.”

Flip looks at him and then laughs. “You’re so full of shit,” he says, but at least he’s laughing, and it’a rarer occurrence than him agreeing with Gabriel on anything. Gabriel isn’t sure how to feel about that. Pleased, maybe heartened, or a combination of both, and maybe his stomach has settled a little but now it’s his knee that won’t stop bouncing up and down.

“You wanna get out of here after the movie?” he says.

Flip raises his eyebrows. “Go back to my apartment?” He sounds vaguely hopeful. They have that in common too: they’re both perverts. Flip is just a little better at repressing his feelings.

“I didn’t mean so we could fuck,” Gabriel says, needing to stop himself from rolling his eyes. “I’m not an animal. We’ll do that later. I just mean, do you wanna go out for lunch? I hear that’s what normal people do, but what do I know. I’ve never gone on a date.” If he sounds anxious, that’s because he doesn’t want to come off looking like an idiot on the off chance Flip rejects him. He’s aware normal people get to know each other first before fucking, that people have to like each other on some fundamental level in order to on a date, but the time of posturing between them is over: Flip has already seen him naked and spread on all fours, and he’s already tasted the inside of Gabriel’s ass.

It’s go big or go home.

“So you’re really taking me out for the whole date experience. A meal and a movie,” Flip states, sounding surprised.

“Well,” Gabriel shrugs. “I don’t do anything by halves.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Flip says, and then there’s a period of weighty silence punctuated by a series of horrific high-pitched screaming coming from onscreen. Blue light casts a ghostly sheen over Flip’s face, dipping half of it in shadow. In this light, and even with Gabriel looking at him from an angle, he’s still handsome. Gabriel isn’t a sentimental person by any means—if he were he wouldn’t be killing people for a living—but this isn’t a feeling, or sentiment, this is him being honest, stating facts: objectively speaking Flip is attractive. He takes care of his body, that much is obvious, he keeps himself neat, so Gabriel can’t be faulted for getting pulled in his orbit, or for wanting things of him and with him he never thought possible.

But it’s all just fantasy, the same hopes that had been dashed as soon as the light left Claire’s eyes as she died in his arms. People like Gabriel aren’t written with good endings. They enter the world with a bang—Gabriel had been born a month early— and exit just as loudly.

“Come on, what d’you say,” Gabriel says, showing a certain amount of teeth now, pulling his eyes low in invitation, his signature move when he wants Flip to do his bidding. “I’ll have you home before seven with your virtue in tact and I promise I won’t even try any of that funny business, keep it all above the waist.”

Flip laughs, and he doesn’t roll his eyes this time which Gabriel considers an improvement. “Well, since you put it that way…” He stands, extending a hand in Gabriel’s direction. Gabriel takes it, using it to buoy himself up to his feet. He doesn’t let go of Flip’s hand, waits until Flip does first, and is surprised to find Flip holding on longer than he ought to, easing his grip only when they duck out of the theater and back into the harsh fluorescent light of the hallway.

* * *

Gabriel takes Flip to the arcade. Flip still looks like he’s waiting for the penny to drop, like this is all some sort of sly joke at his expense and Gabriel isn’t being serious. Maybe Gabriel hadn’t been at first, but now that he’s put some real thought into where he might take Flip so he could be entertained, he’s starting to get nervous, like a dewy-eyed freshman invited to prom.

There’s all sorts of kids milling about at the arcade, crowded around the machines waiting their turn and watching others play. Gabriel challenges Flip to a shooting game, a cheesy western where they have to shoot and outdraw animated cowboys in record speed.

“Up for the challenge?” Gabriel asks.

Flip pulls out the pink plastic gun from its weathered resting place by the machine and carries it like an expert marksman, hands never wavering, posture perfect. “I never miss a shot,” he says, and he sounds so sure of himself Gabriel has to fight off the peal of attraction easing its way under his skin like tea steam.

“Is that a sex joke,” Gabriel asks him.

Flip shoots him a bemused look. “Just shut up and put the coin in.”

“Sex joke,” Gabriel mutters under his breath but he does as instructed.

They play. They spend half an hour shooting cowboys over and over with their multi-colored plastic guns, decimating everything and everyone in their path easily with combined effort. Gabriel tugs a lengthy roll of tickets from the slide slot and they pick their way through various machines that strike their fancy or just happen to be unoccupied by screaming kids: a Pac-Man game, whatever that is, an air hockey table where Gabriel beats Flip by a landslide, a basketball game where Flip accidentally steps on Gabriel’s foot in order to score the winning shot.

They exchange their tickets for a massive bear sporting a green coat and a matching felt cap. Gabriel calls the bear Thomas and he tucks Thomas underneath one arm triumphantly and uses him to push wayward children out of the way when they walk back to their cars. There’s still the question of lunch. It’s a good day, overall: pleasant weather, bordering on crisp, the sky so clear it seems like anything is possible, even such ridiculous notions as a detective and a criminal enjoying a day together.

Flip leans against his car, one hand on the roof, tapping with his fingers. “Hungry?”

Gabriel makes a show of rubbing his belly. “Starving.”

“Good,” Flip says, “There’s this place I really like downtown. You eat bread?”

“Of course I eat bread, I’m Irish, look at who you’re talking to here.”

“Right, then follow me.” Flip gets into his car, but Gabriel taps on the window before he can start the engine.

Flip pokes his head out.

“I thought I was going to take you out to lunch, not the other way around?” Gabriel says.

“You are,” Flip informs him. “I’m not paying for anything.”

Gabriel huffs. “Should’ve known.”

“Hey, you offered,” Flip reminds him, and Gabriel concedes this is true. “Now quit your yapping and follow me.”

Gabriel follows Flip’s car downtown, driving convoy with the window down, something which he is less likely to do in New York where the stench of garbage and pollution often overpower the pleasant everyday smells of the neighborhood.

Flip takes him to a little kosher bakery doubling as a record/bookstore. There are college kids loitering outside wearing bellbottoms and hoop earrings, women with big teased-up hair, the men in aviator sunglasses.

Gabriel shakes his head, mourning today’s youth and their rapidly declining sense of fashion. Flip waits for him to finish parking his car across the street before he jogs to the driver side and opens the door for him.

“How’d you find this place?” Gabriel asks, motioning with his chin to the crowd assembled outside, lighting a cigarette out of habit when thrust into an unfamiliar situation.

“Busted a drug den a few blocks over,” Flip answers with a cough.

Gabriel can’t tell if he’s being serious so he lets that one slide. He lets Flip do the ordering for them because there’s stuff on the menu he’s never even heard of that sound complicated on the tongue. It’s a bit like relearning Gaelic a little too late; he grew up speaking the language until he moved to America and then started to forget it. Now his accent is compromised and his vocabulary is limited and when he tries to converse with mafia dons fresh off the boat, all he gets are bemused looks.

Flip orders them a plate each of spinach and chicken phyllo pie which he said was the only thing his mom knew how to make growing up. He had it every Friday after school, a special treat she made especially for him. She died shortly after Flip joined the police academy—cancer because wasn’t it always—and wouldn’t you know it, they have that in common too: dead mothers. The things you learn about a person when you take the time.

Flip takes a sip of his coffee, leaving his upper lip stained with white froth. Gabriel had ordered coffee to but his came with ice, topped with a lot of whipped cream and a mountain of chocolate shavings, just because he felt like deserved it. He does have a sweet tooth after all. Sometimes a man has to satiate his cravings.

“Iced coffee,” Gabriel hums, already impressed after the first sip. “That’s what they’re calling it now, is it?”

“It’s the way of the future,” Flip laughs.

When the bill arrives, Gabriel pays for everything: the coffee, the pie, the plates of dessert, and he even drops a hefty tip in the jar at the counter. He has a few pastries to go, warmed and wrapped in brown paper which he leaves on Flip’s kitchen counter right before he steps into Flip’s bed.

They fuck first thing. It’s easy now, this part, taking his clothes off, letting Flip have him, maybe not all of him, but some part at least and Gabriel rides Flip like there’s no tomorrow, reverse-straddling his lap so Flip has a perfect view of his back and ass each time Gabriel squats over his dick. They don’t goad each other, or talk dirty, or do much of anything but fuck. It’s good. It always is with Flip, is the thing.

When Gabriel gets tired, they shuffle onto their sides, with Flip thrusting into him and lifting Gabriel’s knee up for the angle to be perfect. He hits Gabriel’s prostate dead on on the third try. After that, Gabriel is pretty much gone, sweating and panting like a pig and trading open-mouthed kisses over his shoulder with too much spit.

Later when it’s all over and the bed stops heaving and they’ve both calmed down, they just happen to fall into a position that’s suitable for spooning.

Flip throws an arm around Gabriel’s middle, leaving it there without a word and Gabriel falls asleep to the sound of Flip’s heavy breathing on his neck, to Flip’s lips moving sleepily across his skin. He dreams about a garden, about serpents and a red apple, and the death card of the tarot, a skeleton dressed in black armor riding a white horse. He dreams of getting shot in the stomach and bleeding out on the ground, clutching his stomach in pain only to see it alarmingly huge and pregnant.

Gabriel wakes ahead of Flip, starting out of his dream with a rabbit-quick gasp. The light outside has softened to a bluish hue, casting the room in a dream-like haze. It rained while they slept; he could tell by the dew on the windows, fringing the street lamps coming to life outside.

Gabriel puts a pair of underwear on that has somehow managed to fly halfway across the room and that he has to peel from a standing lamp. He smokes a cigarette while fishing a box of seven-layer cake out of the brown paper bag he’d left on the counter. That’s how Flip finds him: eating cake in the kitchen standing there in just his briefs, cigarette ash all over the counter, frosting on his fingers and chin.

He’s a third of the way through the cake when Flip flicks the lights on and it’s only then that Gabriel realizes he’d been eating cake by the glow of the open fridge the entire time, like some sort of madman. He blinks out his daze.

Flip is completely silent, reduced to an unmoving silhouette against the wall. Then he moves to shut the door of the fridge carefully. He’s watching Gabriel, because of course he is. “You all right?” he asks, eyeing Gabriel with a wariness that is probably warranted.

Gabriel feels like he’s in a dream or dreaming, or a combination of the two. “I’m eating cake,” he points out helpfully. Then he adds when the silence starts to descend, “I’m going on a trip tomorrow.”

“Oh?” Flip moves around him to pour himself a glass of water in the sink. Then he turns to face Gabriel fully, in the nude and unashamed about it. “Where to?” he asks.

“New York,” Gabriel tells him and shoves a mouthful of cake into his mouth.

* * *

Gabriel hates traveling. Getting himself out of New York had been hard enough, and while relocating to the Midwest had been a challenge he doesn’t want a repeat of, asking him to pay his old hometown a visit borders on just plain cruel. He has to take an early flight the next day so he hightails it out of Flip’s apartment, then packs a duffel bag full of clothes to take with him on the trip. He can’t bring a gun—he isn’t stupid enough to think he can get past customs without getting tackled to the ground—but he still has old friends in the area willing to lend a helping hand should he ever require a firearm.

It’s only been ten months, but a lot seems to have changed in that span of time though it’s nothing outwardly obvious: there’s still garbage rotting on the streets and the same businesses up and running, the bakeries and the laundromats and the drug stores and the 24-hour delis with the delivery trucks parked out front.

Gabriel takes a taxi to Hell’s Kitchen even if the job doesn’t call for it, just so he can walk the streets again and peer into storefronts like he used to not so long ago. It’s a strange thing to be back again; he feels like such a fraud, feeling his way around town like a tourist in his own backyard. Luckily, he doesn’t run into anyone he knows, not any of the Walshes or the Correttis, not even Ruby O’Carroll who had summoned him back all those years ago like a death hound against all her enemies.

He meets with a contact in Brooklyn who supplies him with a gun and enough bullets for an armed robbery even though he expects it to be an easy job, as it most often is these days. It’s just some upstart businessman who happened to be unlucky enough to piss Morello’s associates off, a quick in and out.

Gabriel has enough information on the man to know his exact whereabouts at any given time but Gabriel still follows him around for a day just to map out the logistics of the kill. The man’s name is Alfred Windsor. He’s forty-two, married with a small toddler, another one on the way, and on Friday evenings after work he goes to Park Slope to meet with his lover Oliver Schulman who teaches high school physics for a living. They sit drinking coffee and hold hands under the table of an Italian restaurant. For dessert, they have zabaglione and tiramisu. They split the bill. Windsor is a terrible tipper.

But he holds the restaurant door open for Schulman when they duck out of the restaurant half an hour later. He settles Schulman’s hat lower on his head to keep his ears warm against the New York chill as they wander down the block with their pace even and their hands kept to themselves now that they can be seen together in public.

Then Windsor kisses Schulman tenderly, there, in a rare bit of shadow, when the street has emptied itself of people and all front doors and windows have been shut and locked for the night. Sometimes people can surprise you, Gabriel thinks, watching them part ways at the end of the street and head separately to their cars.

Windsor and Schulman drive off eventually, but this time Gabriel doesn’t follow them.

* * *

Another day, another job, and Gabriel manages to convince himself it’s nothing personal when he flies back to the Midwest with heavier pockets than when he had left and one less clean shirt in his carryon. The flight takes only three hours but he feels strangely jet-lagged regardless. The further west he is, the earlier the hour, and by noon in Colorado Springs, running on little next to no sleep, Gabriel finally collapses in the back of a taxi with three day’s worth of stubble on his cheeks and a migraine trying to assert itself in his temples.

He tells the cabbie his address. “Take me home,” he says, and closes his eyes so there will be no small talk forthcoming. He hates that about taxi drivers in New York, where he mostly wanted to be left alone to brood in silence. He arrives just shortly after 1PM just as the traffic is choking into motion, tossing his bag aside and kicking off his shoes to begin his exhaustive trek to the bed while shedding the rest of his clothing from the front door to the hall.

The apartment has never felt like home to him; he’s never truly settled in it but at least it’s not a shitty two-star hotel with a view of masonry and pill bugs living in the cracks of the walls. He’s grateful to be back, to sink into the comforting grooves of his mattress with its familiar indents and the faint smell of sweat and sex that lace it as Flip has been a constant visitor in the recent days.

Gabriel closes his eyes, curls up into a comma, and just before he falls into doze has the gut sense to look out the window. He hasn’t survived in his profession as long as he has by ignoring his gut sense so he peels himself off the bed and peers outside groggily. There’s a light rain misting the window, and from across the street he can see Flip making his way to his building. He’s smoking, cigarette held between two fingers, head ducked down as if that will help him avoid the rain that’s drizzling like tinsel over everything and falling in sparking lines. Then Flip stops halfway across the street, looking up at the last moment to squint up at him and wave.

Gabriel’s chest squeezes tight. He thinks of Windsor lying in a tub in his own pool of blood, late for his dinner plans, his body cold and immoveable as stone. Of the phone ringing in the background, on and on, a shrill piercing cry in the otherwise still silence, of the people Windsor has loved and will be leaving now that he’s dead, the names on the will that he’s drafted prematurely knowing this was coming for him, that it was imminent, that death wears all sorts of faces and his messenger just happened to be in the form of an Irishman down on his luck with an affinity for guns.

Windsor was a dick to his secretary; he cheated on his wife. Schulman wasn’t the only lover he took during his six year marriage.

Gabriel checks the window again, but Flip is gone. He hunkers down on the bed, elbows on his knees, rubbing the ache from behind his eyes with the tips of his fingers, before rooting through the back pockets of his jeans on the floor for a smoke. He smokes a cigarette, then another, waiting for the telltale knock at the door to announce Flip’s arrival. But it doesn’t come. He blows through the rest of his cigarettes, at least a dozen sticks smoked down to the filter, but there are no signs of Flip. He checks the window again but there’s nothing there, no one, just pedestrians on their way home and disappearing down the street, carrying armfuls of grocery bags.

He wakes up in the back of a taxi, his head pounding like someone had taken a sledgehammer to his skull. The driver is shaking him awake, jostling him on the shoulder firmly. “Hey, man,” he’s saying, “We’re here. We’ve arrived.”

Gabriel blinks, wipes drool off his mouth on the back of his sleeve and tosses a wad of bills in the driver’s direction without counting them. He grabs his duffel bag and his jacket from the backseat and takes the stairs up to his unit. His hands are steady when he slides the key in the lock, his footsteps sure when he steps out of his shoes and unbuttons his shirt, tossing it calmly at a waiting armchair by the bed. He strips down to his underwear and undershirt which has now turned into the same off-white color after one too many washes.

Flip had fucked him wearing just this undershirt, Gabriel remembers, had slipped his big hand up Gabriel’s tank to ruck it up to his armpits, before wrapping his fingers around Gabriel’s ankles and taking him in one long, deep thrust that made the both of them groan loud enough to wake the dead. He said he liked the look of Gabriel with his shirt pushed up to his tits, that the gold cross Gabriel liked to wear that often sat primly at his throat was more suited for a saint, and no saint took dick quite as well and as greedily as Gabriel did, with spread legs and an aching need to always have his hole filled.

It’s true though what he said, it’s not just nonsense meant to get Gabriel’s dick hard. He’s been with women before, countless women, he loved them all and broke their hearts, but there’s something about surrender and being pinned flat on his back with his wrists bound above his head that makes his bones sing; there’s something about just doing it with another man. Maybe his tastes have changed over the years; maybe he’s just closeted; maybe he’s been thinking about Flip all too often and should stop. Too much of one thing is gonna be a problem in the future.

The bed is just as Gabriel left it: unmade, cold from not having slept in it for days. He sits on the very edge of it, face in his hands, breathing in the smell of grease and bleach and gun powder and sweat, sighing when his head starts to pound again. He thinks about Flip, wants to look out the window. He doesn’t.

Instead he looks around: at the half-empty glass of water he left on the bedside table, his laundry lying in an untended heap on the floor; the flimsy curtains that need washing, the crack in the ceiling he swears is getting bigger and bigger every day, and Flip’s watch on the windowsill, the one with the broken face, an old family keepsake from his grandfather who never made the trip to America, that Flip often used as an excuse so he could pay Gabriel a visit. They both know the real reason he drops by on occasion and it’s not about the watch.

This is it. Gabriel’s here.

He’s home.

* * *

To some extent, Gabriel enjoys working at Larry’s. He likes to profile people and practice his due diligence as a barkeep by watering down drinks if people happen to piss him off or appear to have had too much for the night or if they show him an obviously fake ID. Some days he has enough patience to deal with rowdy customers and more often than not, though it’s no fucking surprise, they happen to be Flip’s buddies from the Klan who test his ability to keep a straight face while pouring hard liquor he is tempted to spike with cyanide.

But he’s had practice. He can filter out unnecessary chatter when the need arises. If he can tune out the dying screams of Alfred Windsor, then he can put on a fake smile as he hands Felix Kendrickson his drink, wiping up the drops that slop out of the rim of the glass with a paper towel and a little flourish.

Gabriel winks at him, and Felix, already two hard drinks in and flushed to the ears, may sneer at him in return but Gabriel can see that telling blush underneath it all. It’s the closeted ones that hit the hardest after all, that bray the loudest, and Felix may harp on about how he hates fags and god hates fags but when presented with the opportunity, he’d probably be the first in line to have a go at Gabriel. After all, Gabriel can take just as good as he can give, and boy can he give.

Felix may not be his type—scrawny and a little rat-faced with prejudices a mile wide—but he’s done things in the past just to prove a point.

It’s a slow night with two hours left of Gabriel’s shift. He can quit this job, doesn’t think Larry would take it against him, but civilian life has its perks. It’s not the life he once had in New York: jumping from one apartment to another or motel to motel depending on the job and eating cheap food while sleeping in his car when his latest conquest decides to kick him out of the apartment. Maybe it’s a sign of getting older because Gabriel loves what he does and the easy money he gets out of it but some days he just longs for a humdrum existence. He wants a warm bed he can sleep in and good food in the kitchen and the knowledge that he doesn’t have to lock all the doors and windows or check on them before bed because he can sleep safe and sound; there won’t be any enemies; he can put the gun away.

He wants a stupid job he can complain about; he wants a dog, even though the only dog he ever had as a kid got lost in the park and was never seen again. He wants a boring routine: coffee in the morning, a savings account, yearly trips to Florida in July shithole that it is. He wants friends he can trust not to sabotage his current livelihood. He hates needing to remember the combination of safes, of keeping all his important shit behind the fridge or under the floorboards or inside the toilet tank. He hates having dreams: of the war, of the people he’s loved, the ones he’s killed racking up quite the tally. He wants to quit. Shit, he just might. He can. He will.

He won’t.

He knows this is just a feeling, that it’s something that’ll pass that he just needs to sweat out like a fever. He needs something to get rid of it. Something to blank out his mind into a clean white slate. Booze, or drugs, though he’s careful now about putting anything in his body that might compromise him.

He meets Flip’s eyes from across the room and tamps down on the eager knot swelling in his belly. The contact is brief: Flip doesn’t smile, but he doesn’t pull his gaze away either until Ivan elbows him in the ribs to make a dumb joke Flip only pretends to care about.

When they break away, Gabriel pretends to be avidly immersed in cleaning a spot on the bar with a wet dishrag. Two hours later, he finally closes shop, sets everything to rights and then turns off all the lights one by one, sending people home short of politely telling them to go the fuck home to their wives. He drives home with a pair of familiar headlights shining in his rearview mirror following him street after street, down one block after another. He slows down to nose the car up to the parking lot, where he kills the engine and steps out of the driver’s side, keys swinging in hand before he pockets them.

Flip follows suit, slamming the driver side door shut and striding towards him with purpose. His hands are hot on Gabriel’s hips, and Gabriel isn’t expecting the deep kiss that Flip gives him, nor to be pressed flush against the car just so Flip can have total control over his mobility. He curls his fingers into Flip’s belt loops, tugging him ever forward as Flip uses a knee to pin him firmly in place, wedging it between Gabriel’s thighs that are all too eager to part for him without question.

“Waited for you all night,” Flip says, and he sounds tired but he’s smiling.

“You gonna fuck me here?” Gabriel grins. He chases Flip’s kisses with sharp little nips, sucking on his bottom lip before letting it go with a smirk. “Against the car?”

Flip looks at him, and something in his gaze makes Gabriel’s insides spool like threads. No one’s ever looked at him like that before, Gabriel thinks. Maybe Claire who shaped the unformed clay of his heart and pressed it to its current form, but she wanted things he couldn’t give her and looked at him like she just wanted to be saved.

Flip isn’t like that.

Flip is—

“No,” Flip laughs softly, the moment gone quickly in the blink of an eye that Gabriel is sure for a moment he’d been imagining things. “I’m gonna fuck you in bed. Slowly,” he says, his voice low and syrupy now, “Just how you like it. Gonna use just a bit of lube so it’d sting a little, going in. So you’d feel it, my cock inside you, stretching you, filling you up.”

“I do like a bit of pain,” Gabriel agrees.

“Yeah,” Flip says, and he huffs, still staring into Gabriel’s face, his smile rueful. “You do, don’t you.”

* * *

Gabriel spends the majority of his time in two places: work and Flip’s apartment. Sometimes it’s work and his own apartment where Flip will be waiting for him while twiddling his thumbs but the common denominator these days is unsurprisingly: Flip. Not that Gabriel minds, it’s not like he has better places to be than squashed underneath the solid weight of a man trying to plow him six ways into the mattress. As far as new routines go, Gabriel likes how this one is taking shape; it’s an easy rhythm to fall into, day in and day out. There are hardly any complications bigger than they can handle. As long as neither of them talks about the elephant in the room— the fact being Gabriel is far from innocent and Flip should arrest him, not with his cock—they’re safe, happy.

He feels like a normal everyday citizen worrying about the mundane, complaining about traffic, noticing the number of growing items that doesn’t belong to him taking up space in his closet and bathroom sink, stuff that he hasn’t swiped in secret while Flip wasn’t looking. He has a rotation of clothes in Gabriel’s drawers, his own mug tucked in the kitchen cabinet with the CSPD logo on it. Eyedrops in the medicine cabinet, allergy medication. There’s a tube of lube living in the nightstand drawer, the bland kind that Flip likes to use because it doesn’t smell like anything. He brought it with him one night a few weeks ago, left it there and never took it home. Which is just as well because now Gabriel can sleep better knowing lube is just close at hand and neither of them would have to raze the whole apartment looking for a substitute. They’ve tried cooking oil once and Gabriel doesn’t want a repeat of that night. 

And yet this is his life now: 

Flip picks him up from work after his friends have all gone home, and they drive through sleepy roads with the chirp of evening birds and the rustle of trees as accompaniment. Flip takes him to his apartment, where they fuck, sleep, eat the leftovers in the fridge just a few days shy of going bad, and then they take separate showers and fall asleep again. Gabriel wakes up most mornings overheated and uncomfortable with Flip draped along his back like a weighted blanket. The man likes to cuddle. You wouldn’t think it, looking at him, this big mass of a man with the sternest scowl needing something warm in his bed to help him fall asleep. But it seems that Gabriel isn’t the only one plagued with bad dreams because Flip wakes up some nights drenched in cold sweat, lurching up like he’d just been shot and scrambling for the bedside lamp.

On weekends, Gabriel wakes up ahead of him. He’ll make breakfast, put the percolator on, watch the neighbors from the kitchen window, wondering whether the husbands are being faithful to their wives or having affairs, before eventually slinking back to bed and straddling Flip’s chest to wake him. Before all of that he quietly gets ready for the day, parting his hair in the bathroom mirror with careful strokes of his comb before collecting discarded laundry in the den. He walks around the apartment in his socks and underwear, slurping milky cereal from the bowl as he waits for the toast to finish and does the Sunday crossword at the kitchen table, crossing out every word he’s completed with a felt tip pen, an ashtray full of half-smoked cigarettes sitting at his elbow.

Sometimes he has to get up an hour early, particularly if he has a shift at Larry’s but also when he's feeling charitable or hungry enough to make breakfast that doesn’t consist solely of black coffee and cigarettes. The bacon has to be fried to a perfect crisp, the eggs soft but not runny. Flip likes his pancakes thick and liberally buttered because he isn’t careful about his weight– he has a poor man’s appetite and eats like he’s starving. If he can get away with it, he’d have hot wings and beer every night for dinner.

He’d be soft in the middle before long but at least he can still pick Gabriel up by the waist and heft him over his shoulder, fuck him the way Gabriel likes. They can go on and on for hours: fucking, falling asleep, fucking again; fumbling around in the dark until Flip is perfectly slotted behind Gabriel and starts to thrust.

Sometimes Flip accosts Gabriel in the bathroom while he’s still brushing his teeth, and slides a hand inside the loose waistband of Gabriel’s underwear to cup his soft cock. Other times, if he’s up early enough, he crowds Gabriel against the bathroom sink and strokes Gabriel’s ribs sleepily, rubbing his thumbs up the taut plane of Gabriel’s belly and over the peaks of his soft nipples, then down again toward the dip of his hip and the soft crease at his waist left by the pinching of his jeans. 

Gabriel likes it best when he’s fucked in front of the bathroom mirror in the morning, bent carefully over the sink and breached in one hot slide. He likes to watch: as he’s fucked, as his face crumples in a frisson of discomfort, and then pleasure, as Flip spreads his knees and spears him wet and open with his cock, every sleepy roll of his hips tucking him deeper and deeper. He comes inside Gabriel because they’re both lazy and don’t give a shit and because the dirtier and sloppier the sex is, the harder Gabriel comes.

This morning, Flip seizes Gabriel by the waist while he’s doing the washing up, spinning him around to give him a tongue-filled kiss. Gabriel can feel where Flip’s hand is spread wide against the underside of his stomach, near enough to his twitching cock that he nearly bites Flip’s tongue when Flip starts grinding his erection against Gabriel’s thigh. 

He’d been busy all week with police work—Gabriel doesn’t ask questions but Flip volunteers information anyway like he’s his personal therapist or walking diary—leaving Gabriel alone unfucked and bored, working tedious shifts at Larry’s and being the sole recipient of Felix’s dirty looks.

He’d fucked Gabriel into exhaustion the previous evening, so hard Gabriel can still feel his hole gaping, his thighs papery with bits of dried come. Flip can get overenthusiastic sometimes, and he’d had a huge load to blow since Gabriel hadn’t been there to take care of him.

He nips Gabriel’s lower lip when they part for breath; it looks like Gabriel is going to get fucked this morning and his spine sings in anticipation. This shouldn’t make him incredibly excited in ways he does not care to examine but it does, oh how it fucking does. His stomach is doing funny things from the way Flip is looking at him right now, earnest, almost expectant, though the effect is ruined by the insistent press of his boner. 

“Thought you’d already left,” Flip tells him, and he looks relieved that Gabriel hasn’t. Gabriel thought of leaving while Flip was asleep but it’s a weekend and he has nowhere else to be and he does like playing house with Flip and all that entails. 

“Thought I’d keep you company for a while. Don’t want the good detective getting lonely now do I?” Gabriel smirks, wiping his hands on his shirt and sliding his arms around Flip’s neck. Flip heaves him up into his arms and Gabriel curls his legs around his waist, letting Flip carry him into the living room where Flip lowers him onto the shag carpet and begins to peel off his boxers. 

Flip tugs his them over his ankles then gives his ass a smarting slap. “Jesus, I’m still tender from last night. Go slow all right?”

“Sorry,” Flip says, pouting a little like a kid. He shouldn’t look so pitiful doing that; he has no right. He even smells like shampoo, clean and minty. His hair is damp between Gabriel’s fingers when Gabriel guides him down to his lap. His stubble rasps the slivers of hair on Gabriel’s legs when Flip kisses him from knee to calf, and then back, his fingers following in their wake, his nose running a ticklish path up Gabriel’s thighs. Then he wraps his hands around Gabriel’s ankles, before spreading them apart, and Gabriel buckles under the weight of his gaze, the want burning up like a fever inside his bones. 

Flip runs his face across the inside of his thighs, deliberately tickling him with his stubble, huffing out a laugh when Gabriel grabs him by the shoulders and tells him to quit it. “It tickles,” he complains, but without any real heat in it. “I know,” Flip tells him. That’s why he does it again, probably, but this time Gabriel says nothing about it, snorting and rolling his eyes, lurching his hips when Flip takes him into his mouth in one deep swallow. He starts whimpering when Flip presses a finger in, deep into the knuckle, two fingers, and then three, wet with lube as he scissors Gabriel and licks his cock in turns. 

“You like that?” Flip grins, noting how hard Gabriel’s dick is, canting to the left and pushing out precome at the tip. Gabriel yelps when he feels the slick point of Flip’s tongue touching the hang of his balls, then his taint, and then without any warning at all, he’s holding him open with the pads of his two thumbs. Gabriel sighs, his hole clenching up at the thought of being filled, so empty now without Flip’s thick fingers to rub the ache away. 

Gabriel leans up on his elbows, glancing down at Flip whose head is between Gabriel’s spread legs and whose shoulders seem wider from this angle. Flip seems to come to a decision because he nods just the once before pressing a kiss to the inside of Gabriel’s thigh. Then he blows a wad of spit into Gabriel’s hole so that it trickles nastily down his thigh, and Gabriel loses it, spitting precome all over his belly and barely resisting the urge to ride his ass over Flip’s lecherous mouth. 

He crumples, like a deck of cards as Flip eats him out like champ, humming in his throat, every deep-voiced groan reverberating inside his chest, like this is something he could be doing all day. Gabriel’s thighs ache a little from being spread so wide, his chest starting to sweat as Flip works his mouth all over him. He feels Flip’s fingertip drag across his hole, testing the give, before he presses two fingers in and starts pumping them in and out, watching Gabriel’s face for signs of pain, his free hand curled on Gabriel’s knee, squeezing him in pulses. 

Gabriel feels loose and relaxed, riding the high of his impending orgasm, and tugs Flip forward by the neck, on top of him. “Come on,” he breathes. “I’m so fucking ready. Fuck me or I’ll shoot your head off.” 

“Does it hurt?” Flip groans after the first thrust, boxers hanging off the seat of his ass because he couldn’t be bothered taking them completely off. 

“No,” Gabriel says and sobs when Flip pulls back and then pushes back in, his thighs trembling as precome leaks from the head of his cock. It still stings a bit, his ass needs a fucking break, but Flip was right about him that first time: he’s a masochist, and he does like a little bit of pain, making things harder for himself than they should be. He and his mom had that in common; something to do about being Catholic. 

“You need to start being honest with me,” Flip tells him, raising both his eyebrows. It sounds like he just doesn’t mean about sex but at this point he could be talking about anything: Gabriel’s wishy washy ways, his tendency to conveniently borrow Flip’s things and never return them, the fact they can never seem to agree on what his middle name really is. It’s Stensland, after his great uncle. Gabriel told him once when they were both getting high and swapping stories in between giving each other blowjobs.

“Hey,” Flip says, “I’m going to pull out for a second—” 

Gabriel grabs his forearm. He’s locked in Flip’s embrace, his knees bracketing Flip’s sides, his legs spread open. The flat of his feet touch Flip’s back. He doesn’t want Flip to move for all the wrong reasons. “Don’t.” He starts trembling from the legs up. “Just — just stay there. Shit, if you move I might come and I don’t want to blow my load just yet.” 

Flip waits. He kisses Gabriel on the cheek, the nose, the sides of his mouth. He’s always been a great kisser, alternating pressure, knowing when use tongue and when to pull away. He kisses Gabriel slowly, wrapping his hand in his hair until Gabriel’s head falls back on the carpet and he shudders. Flip starts to move again at his prompting, short abortive thrusts of his hips to work Gabriel up into a frenzy, and then suddenly it doesn’t sting anymore so much as feel like a pleasant ache needing to be rubbed over and over. 

Gabriel’s toes curl in pleasure when Flip rolls his hips and surges forward, keeping himself buried to the root long enough that Gabriel starts to pant. He does this twice, letting Gabriel ride each wave, pressing his hands flat under Gabriel’s knees to fold him in two, stirring him up with his dick. 

“Do you want to ride me?” Flip asks, still thinking about Gabriel’s comfort even at this point. “Get on top?” 

“No, no,” Gabriel babbles. “I like it like this. Fuck me like this.” 

“Yeah?” And Flip punctuates that statement with another deep thrust, making the ache inside Gabriel loosen, his hole clench around Flip’s dick like a fist. His own cock pulses weakly between them, oversensitive from the friction between their bellies. He knows he’ll come soon, and Flip hasn’t even touched his cock. He prefers it this way, anyway. Coming without touching. Letting Flip pound him deep into the carpet till his back breaks. He deserves it: the humiliation of it, the pain, the surrender, all of it. It feels good.

“You like that baby?” Flip grunts, fucking him harder, faster, as if this is a competition of speed and accuracy. He keeps hitting Gabriel’s prostate dead on, making him jerk and whine, completely out of character. “You like taking that big fucking cock?” 

“I love taking that big fucking cock,” Gabriel laughs, only because it’s true. He nods several times, cock hard and wet, bobbing with every heave of Flip’s body above him. “Fat fucking cock full of come for me.” 

“Yeah?” And Flip laughs too, slipping them both out of the fantasy, but he manages to reassert himself by biting Gabriel on the shoulder, then pushing back in, inch by slow inch until he’s fully sheathed once more and Gabriel can hardly breathe. This part he likes too, the mindlessness of Flip’s dirty talk. He says whatever filth he can think of, probably borrowed from cheap pornos, but it gets the work done, makes Gabriel’s dick hard, and Gabriel has a few spiels of his own that pushes Flip’s buttons.

“You want that come, baby? Filling you up?” 

This time Gabriel doesn’t roll his eyes. “Fill me up, yeah,” he says instead, dropping his voice to something honeyed and sweet. “Come on, do it, do it. Give it to me Zimmerman,” he babbles. If it were any one else he wouldn’t be caught begging but it’s Flip, whose off-key singing he doesn’t mind as much as he often complains about it, and who still for some reason hasn’t killed him in his sleep or called the CSPD on him. Flip who, like a trained dog, comes to heel when Gabriel wills it.

“Show me how much you want it then,” Flip grunts, fucking him roughly until he cries out.

And this part is easy, Gabriel does it without thinking: he lifts his arms in total surrender and his shirt rides up to his ribs, hiking up just high enough to tease Flip with a view of his chest, his nipples. He keeps his knees spread so Flip can see himself where he’s tucked in deep, his cock stretching out Gabriel’s flushed little hole. Gabriel can feel him too, every hot inch of him.

“Good boy,” Flip breathes, petting his hair, fat cockhead pushing in in another slow slide.

Flip fucks Gabriel slow and lazy after that, kissing every shuddering sigh out of Gabriel’s mouth and swallowing it into his own. His entire body covers Gabriel’s completely, his sweat pasting their chests together. Each thrust pulls a breathy moan from Gabriel and he gasps sharply as Flip starts plucking at his nipples under his shirt, rolling them between thumb and forefinger until they feel sore and stiff.

He whimpers when Flip’s pace shifts, when his rhythm picks up and he starts putting his back into it. Flip groans, clutching Gabriel’s hips tightly as he comes. He empties himself inside Gabriel, not letting him go until he’s completely filled and starts to squirm, and then slumps on top of him to trail his finger down the crease of his sloppy-wet asshole. Gabriel’s hole twitches as come starts to trickle out of it. It used to bother him the first few times, now as with everything else, he’s gotten used to it too. He shoves at Flip’s chest impatiently, batting away his hands. He’s still hard, because of course Flip came first and didn’t think about him at all, the selfish bastard. 

“Make me come, come on Zimmerman,” Gabriel says, shoving him in the shoulder, more forcefully this time until he grunts and blinks down at him sleepily. “It’s my turn. Get to work.”

Flip blinks again then huffs out a laugh. He wraps a hand around Gabriel’s cock and starts to stroke, reaches with his free hand to finger Gabriel in tandem: rough, erratic, forceful to the point of pain, but Gabriel loves it and rocks back, lets those fingers spread him like a complete little slut.

“Now suck my cock,” Gabriel groans, grabbing him by the back of the head, “Put my dick in your mouth. Fuck, yeah, just like that. _God, _yeah suck my dick. Fuck. So good.” 

Flip goes to work on him with the diligence of someone who used to be a choir boy, and Gabriel is a terrible terrible man for thinking it but those are just such beautiful lips. Flip drags his tongue down the length of him before sucking him down to the root, his throat working him down hard, his fingers never losing their rhythm pressed up Gabriel’s ass.

“Here it comes, oh fuck, here it comes…” And then there’s white noise, and Gabriel almost blanks out, and then Flip is swallowing around him so wonderfully and pulling off in time just so Gabriel could see his throat bobbing as he swallows every drop. Flip watches him come down from his high, licking his lips, but he misses a spot. Gabriel reaches out to wipe it off the corner of his cheek and they stay on the floor for the next ten minutes, not talking, just breathing, completely naked now that Flip has the decency to kick off his boxers. It’s still early and neither of them has anywhere else to be. 

Gabriel can cook breakfast, or take a shower, or he can leave now and go about the rest of his day. He can walk away from all of this: the hidden complications of their relationship or whatever the fuck it is that’s going on between them. He can turn his back on it all. But he doesn’t. It’s a weekend and far too early to be driving back to his own apartment where he’ll be alone and the fridge is empty. So he stays put. He stays put long enough that he falls asleep to Flip stroking his arm and murmuring things into his hair.

But of course the peace doesn’t last.

* * *

Morello offers him another job two months later, and they meet in an old folk’s home where Morello’s nana is hosting a bi-monthly bingo game, the proceeds of which will be donated to charity. It’s a funny thing seeing Morello there, bucket hat hiding his receding hairline as he argues with old folks just trying to have a good time. He’s not supposed to have a life outside of mediating for Gabriel and his contacts, but there he is, mildly tipsy at a bingo game, getting increasingly frustrated when he loses a round to Roger Jelen, an eighty-six year old former postman with a bad knee.

Morello turns to Gabriel as soon as he arrives and gives him a once-over, unable to hide his disdain. “You look well.”

Gabriel wishes he could say the same for Morello. He’s expecting baby number two, and it looks like the stress is taking its toll because neither he nor his wife had been expecting another baby when the first one can barely walk. Gabriel knows this because he likes to keep himself well-informed whether it comes to jobs or the people he works with. He likes to do things old school and tends to be very thorough in his research, with a journal full of notes that he stores in a safe place next to his gun. The page on Flip is rich and teeming though it’s been a while since a new entry has been made after “hates strawberry yogurt” and “is a bad speller”. 

Sometimes Gabriel hates the fact that when he meets someone new his first instinct is to stalk them. In his defense, it’s a fast and more efficient way to get to know anybody. People lie all the time but their day to day routines say more about themselves than they’re willing to admit.

Gabriel takes the proffered seat across from Morello but declines the bowl of greasy peanuts he nudges in Gabriel’s direction. “Should we be here discussing this?” he asks, glancing around the room. In the background, someone yells ‘Bingo!’ causing half the room to cheer and erupt into forced, scattered applause. 

“Look where we are right now, O’Malley. Half the population here’s a fucking sneeze away from death, you think it matters if people overhear us?”

Gabriel concedes the man has a point. 

Morello stubs his cigarette on a paperweight of a duck before pulling out a small brown envelope from the inner pocket of his jacket. He slides it across the table silently, then steeples his fingers as he waits for Gabriel to open it. It’s not money, but the pictures of Gabriel’s next mark.

Years of working in this line of business have taught Gabriel two things: one it’s never personal, and two, when it is, you just have to learn how to stomach it. The rules don’t change for anybody; no one gets special treatment. You can be the hottest shit today but tomorrow you’ll be old news if you don’t abide by the ever changing rules of the time.

If people want someone dead, then by the end of the week their body better be in a ditch somewhere or else it’s your head on a pike. But all of that flies out the window—sixteen years’ worth of reputation, sixteen years of putting bullets in people and getting nothing but a headful of bad dreams for it, all of it vanishes into cartoon smoke when he sees Flip’s photos staring back at him. 

There are four in total, and they all look like they have been taken from a distance: shaky, out of focus, Flip in his element laughing with his friends from the police station. Gabriel has never met any of his cop buddies but he recognizes their faces having followed Flip long enough to notch the details of his routine on his belt. There’s the real Ron Stallworth following Flip to a diner for breakfast, Chief Taggert smoking with him in the parking lot of the CSPD. There’s Flip walking out of Larry’s, him waiting in the parking lot, probably for Gabriel on one of those nights he’d given him a lift home.

It feels like a nightmare, except this one Gabriel is having while completely awake. 

“Someone wants him dead?” Gabriel asks, amazed at his own ability to keep a level head about this. He can’t stop staring at the photos, wondering who might have taken them. He’s been careful about his dalliance with Flip, but no, that’s a big fucking lie: he knew he was police, he knew the problems that might come with it, but he let his dick do all the thinking. Stupid, stupid. Will he ever learn? Of course it’s going to come to this; it always does, in the end.

Morello snorts, rolls his eyes. His upper teeth are stained yellow with nicotine. “If we just wanted him roughhoused we wouldn’t have come to you.”

“You know who wants him dead?”

Morello gives him an incredulous look. “You know how we roll, O’Malley. We don’t ask questions. We just do the job we’re paid to do. I give you the money, you get your hands dirty. How about we stick to that, huh?”

Gabriel flicks his eyes from one picture to another before sliding them back slowly across the table back to Morello. He drums his fingers on his knee, thinking, thinking. “I know this guy,” he says, finally, “He’s CSPD, a detective.”

“Guy put half of my friends behind bars,” Morello confirms with a sneer. “He’s getting what’s coming to him, to tell you the truth. Our friends over at the organization? Not very pleased with him. He’s playing them for fools, working undercover.”

“How do you know he’s working undercover?” Gabriel asks. 

“Look,” Morello sighs, spreading both hands palm up like he’s exasperated by this line of inquiry, “I don’t call the shots here. Hell, half the time I don’t even know who we’re working for. But this guy has pissed a lot of people off and there’s someone wanting his head on a plate and that someone is willing to pay good money.”

“Is that someone named Felix Kendrickson?” Gabriel says, because Felix is an asshole who’s been eyeing Flip suspiciously since day one. He can’t make it any more obvious that he hates Flip’s every being. He’d followed Flip once but couldn’t find any dirt on him.

“Who?” Morello says, “O’Malley, c’mon, I need you on this job. If you wanna back out, just say so, I can always get someone else, but frankly it worries me that you’re putting up a lot of fuss. What’s the matter? You friends with this guy or something?”

“Or something,” Gabriel says, then he huffs, before begrudgingly accepting the second envelope Morello slides across the table. He counts all the bills to make sure he isn’t being swindled before stuffing the envelope in his back pocket; he’ll get the other half later. That’s how Morello and his associates operate. They want to make sure you’ll come through first before trusting you with the entire payout.

“You got a timeline for me?” Gabriel asks, pulling out his lighter and pack of smokes.

Morello grins, shark-like and not friendly at all. “Now we’re talking.”

* * *

In New York, during Gabriel’s last jaunt there, he had gone to a florist to pick out white-petaled roses to leave on Claire’s grave. He didn’t want to pay her a visit but it felt wrong, blasphemous somehow not to, so he went. He left her the roses, said a prayer even if it had been a while since he last prayed or gone to church with the express intent to commune with the Lord. 

For the most part he just felt silly, like he was talking at air, and maybe he was but it felt good to speak the words, like a pilgrim being absolved of all their sins by virtue of their confession. He missed her and four years was a long time to mourn someone, but he missed her: whenever he heard someone in the room laughing, or when he sat down to watch TV and her favourite shows came on. She didn’t deserve to die. 

When Gabriel left to take care of business with Windsor, he thought about Claire lying there in the dirt, her bone white skin eaten by maggots, the worms nesting in her eyes. He couldn’t save her. 

Is this the life God had wrought for him? No, this life he had chosen for himself. And he could choose not to let Flip die.

* * *

There are two other people in the laundromat: an old guy in one of the fold up chairs reading today’s newspaper and a college kid in red flannel hunkered down a couple of seats away, spaced out and most likely stoned. 

Gabriel is sorting out his clothes and looks up briefly from folding a shirt in haphazard sections when a third guy comes whistling in, a pair of headphones hanging like a noose around his neck. 

Gabriel’s clothes are still warm, fresh from the dryer, smelling like detergent. Finally, he gives up on folding them and stuffs everything inside a laundry bag, the leg of his favorite pair of pants stubbornly spilling out. 

Flannel guy gets up to take his laundry out of the dryer. He reminds Gabriel of Flip though he’s a little bit on the young side, his face is spotty with acne, his hair the wrong shade of dark brown. Flip had his own washer and dryer at his apartment and Gabriel would often watch him sort out his clothes when there was nothing else to do: the piles of dark shirts and worn, soft jeans, and the way Flip folded them with careful slowness. He had these hands, they’re the work of the devil, long fingers, sturdy grip, the kind of hands that were reliable, made to built things instead of destroy.

It was one of the first things Gabriel noticed about him. Well, that and there was his dick first and foremost.

Gabriel manages to spend the next few days avoiding Flip. He needs to think, recoup. Work keeps him busy, his day job and his real one both. The one at Larry’s keeps him on his feet. He spends his evenings with the rest of the staff that he hadn’t bothered getting to know, buys them drinks during closing to build a semblance of rapport. They’re younger than he is, most of them in their mid to late twenties, and they all have normal little problems like how to make rent at the end of the month and whether or not they got their girlfriend pregnant. He studiously looks away when Flip glances in his direction, doesn’t let their hands touch anymore when he goes to serve him drinks.

At the end of the week, while he’s closing shop at one in the morning, Gabriel tries not to think about how good he had it with Flip. In fact, he tries not to think about anything at all. 

Instead, he stares off into space, watching the parking lot empty out until eventually even Flip’s car is gone.

* * *

Flip’s apartment is easy to break into; it’s an old building and the locks are fairly easy to pick. Gabriel has no problem entering through the front door. He knows Flip would still be at the police station at this hour so he can pretty much do whatever he wants. 

He sorts through Flip’s mail and rifles through the contents of his desk drawer: magazine subscriptions, utility bills, bank statements. The thing about Flip is he’s as straightforward as they come: he isn’t involved in anything illegal minus sleeping with Gabriel on the regular, he pays his taxes on time, he donates to fucking charity. The reason he’s working in law enforcement is because fundamentally he’s a good person who just happens to be fiercely attracted to a wanted criminal, possibly his only flaw aside from his horrendous taste in clothing. Gabriel can’t blame him. Many have tried and failed not to be lured in by his charms.

“What are you doing here?” Flip says, dropping his keys on the floor in shock. 

Gabriel turns to face him, shutting the fridge door with a thud. “Surprise!” he says with forced cheer. When Flip doesn’t buy it, he sighs and rolls his eyes. “I was bored.” Then he lets his gaze fixate on the real elephant in the room: namely Flip’s banged up arm in a sling. 

“What happened to your arm?”

Flip shrugs, then winces and looks like he instantly regrets the decision. He shuts the door behind him with a nudge of the foot. “Just a little bit of fooling around.”

Gabriel tilts his head and watches him trudge awkwardly towards the couch. “You were shot,” he says matter-of-factly, cold settling uncomfortably in the pit of his stomach, a strange feeling because he’s never felt fear like this before. “That doesn’t seem like just fooling around, Flip. Was it your buddies at the Klan?”

Flip gives him a weighted look. “They wouldn’t shoot me.”

“Not unless they know you’re a mole,” Gabriel points out. 

“We were at a shooting range,” Flip says. “It was a stray bullet. It missed the artery, doc. Do you want to see the full medical report?”

“Was it that rat bastard Felix?”

Flip just starts looking at him like he’s grown another head. “Are you worried about me? Is that what this is?”

Gabriel huffs. “You can be a little dumb sometimes. That’s what worries me, not your general health or well-being.”

And now Flip can’t stop smirking. Jesus he’s handsome whatever the angle, or maybe Gabriel’s just developed a taste for him. 

Flip’s expression softens to a dimpled smile. “I don’t know, it’s nice to be worried about,” he confesses, shrugging. “You ignored me all week. Won’t pick up my calls. I thought all you ever cared about was yourself.” 

“That’s still true,” Gabriel points out. “I do care about myself a lot. Still,” he adds more petulantly.

Flip hums in response like he doesn’t believe him one bit. Then he beckons him over with his good hand, patting the empty space next to him on the couch. “Come here,” he says. 

Gabriel scoffs at him. But then it takes only three, maybe four seconds before he moves to obey the order, slouching next to Flip and frowning openly at him when Flip starts pawing at his hair. Because it’s true: his hands are paws, massive, unbelievably monstrous. They look far too big on everything: when he’s handling a gun, or a knife, when he’s holding a pen. But they feel so good on Gabriel’s body, his hair, kneading his scalp and the back of his neck to worry the tension out of his muscles. Gabriel finds himself sighing and leaning into his touch before long. His eyes close, and he hears Flip’s wry chuckle. 

Gabriel steps on his toes, hard.

“Fuck! You asshole,” Flip hisses, but he says it with such a fond edge, fingers tightening in Gabriel’s hair just enough to make his spine tingle. “What the hell? Did you really have to—ow, _fuck_.”

Gabriel rolls his eyes, sitting up fully now. “Don’t be such a baby, Zimmerman. It wasn’t even that hard.”

“I’m injured! And you stepped on my foot!” Flip huffs.

Gabriel shrugs. He’ll live but the pouty look Flip sends in his direction makes him feel bad so he starts rubbing Flip’s knee in apology. He continues to rub it until Flip’s legs part open in a way that puts Gabriel in the mind for sex. When Flip’s fingers card gently through his hair and tug him down to his lap, Gabriel grins, taking the hint. He slides to his knees between Flip’s spread legs without further prompting, starts palming Flip’s rapidly hardening cock through his jeans. This is probably a bad idea; he shouldn’t even be here in Flip’s apartment when he’s the fucking mark, the job, but nobody said Gabriel couldn’t have a little fun.

Flip groans, a deep reverberating noise in his chest as his head lolls about. 

“Are you fit for active duty? With that arm?” Gabriel asks, both eyebrows raised. 

Flip glances down at him through half-lidded eyes. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll be fine. This is nothing. I’ve had worse before. I was in the military.”

“So was I,” Gabriel says. “And the only reason I survived was because I knew when to keep my head down. Which I don’t think you know how to do.”

“Investigation’s almost over anyway, then I’ll be home free,” Flip says, like he hadn’t heard all that. He runs a palm over his face, raking his hair out of his eyes. He looks tired, the kind that not even sleep or melatonin could fix. What he needs is a long restful holiday but what’s on offer is a halfhearted blowjob.

“What does that mean?” Gabriel asks. 

Flip looks at him, amused. “Are you gonna suck me off or are you gonna keep asking me questions?”

“Yeah, well you don’t need to be a dick about it,” Gabriel says, pausing to unbuckle Flip’s belt with some unnecessary force. “You think I’m gonna want to put your dick in my mouth now? _Bastard_,” he mutters and Flip—bless him— has the good graces to look abashed and reaches out to curl a lock of Gabriel’s hair behind an ear. He strokes the shell thoughtfully, just the ghost of a touch with his thumb. 

“Sorry— just tetchy today I guess. Long day at work.”

Gabriel can relate. Everyday for him feels like a long day at work until he has this: Flip underneath him or on top of him, or just around him generally to prod and to push and to tease and make angry. He tips his face up into Flip’s open palm, kisses it and smells sweat and ink and cigarette ash. He lets Flip pet his hair for a while until the both of them get impatient and Flip starts to push his hips up in silent invitation to get things moving. Gabriel reaches into the waistband of his boxers to take out his long, beautiful cock: hot and heavy in his palm, the head oozing precome at the slit. He has to bite his own tongue to keep from whimpering. It’s a thing of art, truly, and he doesn’t say this often about every man he sleeps with. Dicks are dicks at the end of the day no matter which direction they lean, but Gabriel genuinely gets a rush out of sucking Flip down to the root, feeling the head of his cock brush the back of his throat. It’s pure animal desire, raw and unthinking. He loves the smell of it, the taste of it, the way it fills up his mouth and stretches his lips. 

Flip grunts, adjusting the spread of his thighs. Gabriel scoots closer on his knees, gives Flip’s cock a leisurely pump before pushing his tongue out to taste the trickle of precome sliding generously down the length. He licks the taste back into his mouth before wrapping his lips around the head of Flip’s cock.

It doesn’t take long before he gets a good rhythm going, glancing up through the fringe of hair matted to his forehead by sweat. And the entire time he’s thinking _you should be afraid of me. _He’s thinking, _I’m armed, dangerous, deranged. I can slit your throat Phillip Zimmerman and it would be so easy because you’d let me. _

It would be easy, Gabriel doesn’t doubt that. Flip wouldn’t know what was coming to him. A quick merciful death, because he doesn’t want Flip to suffer.

But then Flip runs his thumb up and down the apple of Gabriel’s cheek in an approximation of tenderness and Gabriel, he stays put on his knees. He stops thinking about anything, except the hot press of Flip’s cock in his mouth, the spit dripping down his chin in messy lines, the fingers in his hair guiding his rhythm. He sucks Flip down to the root, his eyes watering.

Later Flip will tug him up into his lap where Gabriel will ride him, his shirt pulled up to his armpits, his hole loosened by sloppy fingers, arms linked around Flip’s neck for balance. He’ll ride him, sweet and slow, a kind of torture in itself, as Flip licks his nipples and leaves tiny marks on his chest with his teeth, his movements gentle, exploratory, as if this were his first time having Gabriel speared open on his cock, writhing like a ten dollar whore, desperate and needing to come. 

_You should be afraid of me,_ Gabriel will think again for the second time that day, but how can Flip be afraid of him when he touches Gabriel so tenderly, like he’s all he could ever want in anything, anyone? 

* * *

Gabriel knows he can be predictable, that he’s gone soft but fuck if it doesn’t come with age. He follows Felix home the next day, and it’s just his luck that Felix’s wife isn’t home, off to some teacher’s convention where she’ll no doubt get drunk on margaritas and begin a love affair with some hapless stranger. But that’s just wishful thinking. She’s crazy about Felix, whatever it is that she sees in his despicable rat-like face. 

Love is blind, Gabriel supposes. And people have done and will continue to do terrible things in the name of it.

The key goes into the lock, and there’s the telltale squeal as the front door opens and Felix gives it a shove with his shoulder. His arms are full of groceries. He’s whistling a tune, obviously in the throes of a good mood. Gabriel has been waiting for him for a full half hour, checking the house’s many locks and latches while he hashes out a plan. There’s a rotting sofa in the backyard, the carcasses of old plastic Christmas trees past, as well as a lone tire truck hanging from a rope tied to an apple tree.

“Hey,” Gabriel calls out to Felix, crossing the street and climbing up the porch in quick, short strides. “Hey, man! You dropped something!”

When Felix turns, Gabriel aims a punch to his face that knocks him completely out. Nice to know he still hasn’t lost his touch. Felix’s body hits the ground with a thud, groceries spilling everywhere and rolling across the porch. Gabriel squats over him, peers into his face, at the bruise slow to form around his left eye, and flexes his fingers against the knot of pain. He stops to look around for a moment, and when he’s sure that the coast is clear, drags Felix by the ankles inside the house.

Felix, of course, has a basement, stocked full with hunting gear from a mounted head of a stag to an array of firearms on the far wall. It smells like damp down here and rot. Mostly rot. Gabriel ties Felix to a chair with a length of rope he brought for this sole purpose alone, keeping the binds taut and secure as he waits for Felix to come around. It doesn’t take too long, not after Gabriel douses him with a bucket of cold water. Like a man about to drown and only just surfacing for air, Felix takes a lungful of breath and starts to wildly dart his gaze around, re-orienting himself with the waking world and grunting once it hits him he’s been subdued.

Gabriel stares at the chrome mouth of his pink plastic lighter, flicking it open and closed, open and closed. “Felix,” he says, at the exact same time Felix focuses on him, eyes wide first with confusion and then with shock.

“What the fuck!” He tugs at his binds but Gabriel knows how to tie a knot, and it’s not because he was in fucking boy scouts because he never was. His mom was too stubborn to sign him up for it, resisting Gabriel’s father’s each and every attempt to turn him into a full-blooded American. The skill came later in life when he needed to find a way to make people stay put. Panicky people are the terribly, but panicky people in motion are the worst.

“Hey, I know you.” Felix squints at him through the low light of the room, “You’re that queer serving drinks at Larry’s.”

“First of all,” Gabriel says, keeping his tone even-keeled. “I don’t like being called a queer. Second of all,” He lights his cigarette and takes a slow drag, blowing smoke directly into Felix’s face. “Fuck you, Felix.”

“What?” Felix says, huffing. “Fuck you! I’m gonna fucking kill you!”

Gabriel just smiles at him pleasantly. “Not if I kill you first. You know what I do for a living Felix?”

And there it is: fear seeping fast into Felix’s expression. Gabriel’s seen that look before on some his marks. There is the look of a man who knows there’s no hope for him, that there’s nothing else to do but appeal to Gabriel’s mercy here in his own basement where no one will hear him scream. 

Felix grits his teeth. “What do you want from me? I don’t know anything.”

Gabriel hums, moves to pick up his jacket where he left it hanging on a nail on the wall. In the inner pocket is an envelope full of pictures, the same ones Morello showed him a few days ago. “Do you know who this is?” He fans them all out for Felix to see, holding them close enough to his face and tapping Flip in each one of them. 

“_Ron_,” Felix says, jaw clenching visibly. Their eyes meet and he shakes his head. “Is this about him?”

“Did you order a hit on him?”

Felix scrunches his face in disgust. He’s already ugly but the expression makes his face even uglier, more stern, lines appearing in his forehead and around his mouth. “The hell are you talking about?”

“Yes or no,” Gabriel says, getting testy. “Should be easy. Did you order a hit on him?”

“I don’t know shit.”

“We can do this all day Felix or I could blow one of your kneecaps off until you tell me what you know.”

“I said I don’t know shit!” Felix hisses. “Fuck! Why would I order a hit on that guy? You think I got the time? And the money? I’m a mechanic, man! Ain’t got no time for that shit!”

“He’s CSPD,” Gabriel says. “Did you know that?”

“What?” Felix’s expression falters and then realization hits and he goes fucking wild. “Fucking knew it! Fucking. _Knew it!_” He starts laughing hysterically, head tipped back. Manic, mad, face bright with sweat, his chain dangerously close to toppling from the strength of his inredulity. “Keep telling the other guys there was something fishy about that Ron Stallworth, said he’s either a Jew or a cop. And what do you know? I was fucking right all along!”

“Do you know anyone who’d want him dead?”

Felix chooses now of all times to eye Gabriel suspiciously, a full once over that would have made Gabriel uncomfortable if he were twenty years younger and still reaching for his first hand gun. “You a cop too?”

Gabriel cuffs Felix upside the head. “Do I look like a fucking cop to you? Focus, Felix.” Gabriel yanks hard on Felix’s sweat-soaked hair till he juts up his chin at Gabriel, hissing through his teeth, spittle flying with every other breath. “Can you think of anyone who might want our Ronnie boy dead?”

“Plenty of people will want him dead if word gets out that he’s a cop,” Felix huffs.

“I need you to be a little more specific, Felix,” Gabriel says. “Now I know that may be hard for you, but I need a name. Or a list of names; the more the merrier. Is this your wife?” And here Gabriel makes a show of picking up a framed photo of Connie from the mantle, lovely sweet-faced Connie with dark beetle-brown eyes. Gabriel always does this; he can’t stop himself from touching people’s personal artifacts and examining them with a curious eye. They fascinate him all the time, even the boring and the inconsequential. He did this with Flip’s things, going through the contents of his coat pockets and reading bits of crumpled up receipts.

“Nice-looking lady,” Gabriel says, turning the picture this way and that. He glances up to look at Felix who looks like he’s a breath away from lunging at him if only the knots weren’t so tight.

“How long have you been married?” Gabriel asks. “Five years? Twenty? Never been married before, never really thought about it either. Does it ever get old?”

Felix says nothing. Gabriel is already bored. There are only so many questions a man can have unanswered after all. And Gabriel can be a patient man but at the end of the day, he’s just that: a man. He has limits, weaknesses. And now he’s at the end of his rope.

“Felix,” Gabriel says, and this time he paces towards Felix still with Connie’s picture in his hand, his expression calm and unblinking though he’s a mess of rage inside. He leans over him so they’re on eye-level with each other and he pats Felix on the cheek with the same hand holding the gun. “You wanna know how I intend to kill you? Yes? No? Well, let me tell you anyway: I’d shoot you in the head. Right here in the temple. Fastest way to kill a person, you know. You’d be dead before you know it. Then I’d chop you into the smallest little bits I could manage and put you in a blender, take you to work with me in a flask and flush you down a toilet.”

Felix scoffs. “You wouldn’t have the balls for it. _Queer_.”

“Try me,” Gabriel says, smiling.

* * *

Walter Breachway is the president of the Colorado Springs chapter of the organization otherwise known as the Klan. He lives in a modest neighborhood, in a two-story affair with French windows and a spacious backyard with a pool shaped like a kidney and a sun deck that the neighbors constantly complain about. The pool they have no problem with; it’s the sun deck that gets their tongues wagging.

Walter is an engineer at some aerospace company where he makes enough money to send both his kids to private school though a good portion of his fortune comes from funds siphoned from the organization’s accounts as well as generous donations from newly instated Klan members.

Gabriel has seen him before of course, he’s the level-headed leader of Flip’s little group at Larry’s whose job it is to calm Felix and Ivan down when they’ve had one too many and are terrorizing the other customers. Walter isn’t loud or as obnoxious as Felix was even in dying. When he answers the door in a t-shirt and jeans, no shoes, Gabriel is almost tempted to do a double-take. He has never seen Walter in broad daylight, which is just funny to him for some reason reason. Then he remembers it’s a Saturday and Walter has kids and he hears their laughter somewhere in the background like the chirp of spring birds. This is Walter in his down time, stripped of his posturing. He’s just a regular guy, with a family, a dog, and half a million worth of stolen funds in his bank account.

Gabriel puts on his most pleasant smile, the one he uses to con people working in customer service. It works every time but it takes a while before Walter relaxes his grip around the beer in his hand.

“Mr Walter Breachway,” Gabriel says expansively, “I’m a friend of Louis Morello.”

Walter eyes him speculatively which is justifiable given the circumstances of Gabriel’s sudden appearance.He can look inconspicuous when he wants to be but running on little to no sleep and with his hands aching from cutting up a body, he probably looks a little crazed, eyes wild and hair sweaty.

anima

“_Ah, Louis_,” Walter repeats, eyes narrowing as he lets the name sink in. Gabriel can almost see the cogs in his head turning, _clink, clink, clink_, because Walter may be quiet and calm, but so is Gabriel and he knows how people like him think. You don’t get to be president of an organization without knowing how to lie, steal, and cheat, and Gabriel happens to be a pro at all three. He can recognize his own, and there’s a bit of a conman in Walter Breachway. Something in the eyes. 

“Have I met you before?” Walter asks, “You the guy working at Larry’s? Yeah, O’Malley, right? I know you. You work at Larry’s. Serve drinks.”

“Yeah, yeah, exactly,” Gabriel grins. “But I’m not here because of that. I’m here because Morello said you needed my help.” 

The smile from Walter’s face vanishes like ice cream melting in the sun. Felix hadn’t been lying when he said he had no idea who wanted Flip dead but he kept saying Walter was starting to get suspicious, that he was asking around for anyone who could vouch for Flip because he couldn’t seem to keep his damn story straight. Walter had connections and he may be no David fucking Duke, but he had enough money to put a hit on somebody he sees as a potential threat to the organization especially if he’s dipping into said organization’s bank accounts and not his own.

“Can I come in?” Gabriel asks. 

“Louis said you were discreet,” Walter says, but he steps aside anyway to let Gabriel through. A beat passes, then another. It’s a birthday fucking party, with a bunch of Walter’s friends gathered in the living room, holding beers and laughing. Most of them are guys, some of them familiar because Gabriel had looked through every room of Felix’s house and examined every picture hanging from the wall. They may be Klan members, or maybe not, it’s hard to know these days. But that’s not why Gabriel is here.

And then there’s Walter’s wife, holding up a big, beautiful cake.

“We were just about to cut into the cake,” Walter explains, shooting his wife a smile which she returns with just enough wariness directed at Gabriel. “Julie, this is —” He looks at Gabriel, raising both his eyebrows. “O’Malley,” he finishes, “He’s a friend of a friend of mine.” He gives her shoulder a squeeze but she doesn’t relax one bit.

“Just dropping by,” Gabriel says, nodding at her and then the rest of the room at large when they lapse into awkward silence.

Walter leads Gabriel down the hall to his home office where it’s quiet and the door can be locked. It’s clean and spartan, with thick books on engineering on the shelves and the Klan flag spread boldly on the wall behind the desk.

Walter passes Gabriel a beer from the mini fridge but Gabriel declines, holding up his hands. He never drinks on a job. What’s more, he’s trying his damnedest not to blow his fuse. He wants to shoot down the flag, Walter, everyone in this fucking house, though he puts his foot down on children and animals. He can hear a dog barking just outside. It sounds small, agitated.

“So what’s this about?” Walter says, leaning his hip against the desk and crossing his arms. “You want more money? Because that I can arrange. I want this guy dead. I thought he was a friend of the cause but.” He shrugs one shoulder, “I guess it’s hard to trust anybody these days.”

Gabriel agrees, but this is why he has no real friends. He can’t trust anybody. That, and he sleeps with all of them including their mom. Or their dad. “This isn’t about money Mr Breachway,” he says, and this is true because if he followed the money he’d just be another a street thug.

“Then what the hell is this all about? You crashed my fucking party.” Walter’s tone remains good-natured, but there’s an edge of suspicion to it now. “Can we make this quick? I want a slice of my birthday cake. My wife only bakes on special occasions, you see, and if I don’t get the biggest slice I’m gonna be really really upset.”

Gabriel smiles. “Do you love her?” he asks. “Julie?”

“What kind of question is that?” Walter huffs. “Course I do. She’s my wife.”

“I loved a woman once,” Gabriel tells him. “Or, well, I loved her as much as I could anyway. She died, got shot right in the heart. That was three, four years ago; I get the years mixed up sometimes.”

Walter narrows his eyes at him, his whole body tensing, defensive. He puts his beer down, stands ready with his feet planted on the ground, a width apart. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The man you want dead,” Gabriel says calmly, “His name is Phillip Zimmerman. He’s working undercover for the CSPD and plans to take your whole operation down. He’s Jewish. Bet you didn’t know that. A _queer_ too,” Gabriel adds, because he gets a vicious thrill out of the word when spoken by his own tongue, of his own volition. All rough and thrust-quick. Words have power and embracing who you are at the very core can be freeing but so is showing up at an enemy’s door to deliver holy vengeance. 

“Well shit,” Walter hisses, “Shit, man. Now, that’s just fucking disgusting. That little shit. I can’t believe I invited him into my home! I let him watch my kids! _Jesus_.”

Gabriel shrugs then reaches inside his jacket and pulls out his gun. Very calmly he points the barrel at Walter’s head, eyes flicking down to his throat when he sees him visibly swallow. “The world would be a better place without someone like you,” he says, meaning every word and it takes five maybe six seconds before Walter finally understands what’s happening. For most people it can take even longer and what often follows is several minutes of uncomfortable protracted begging, but Walter just holds the fort by giving Gabriel a brief nod that acknowledges that yes, this is it, the end of the line and the end of everything. He’s going to die and Gabriel is here to make sure of it.

“You don’t know that,” Walter tells him, holding his hands up now in surrender, unmoving except for his eyes. “If I die, someone else will take my place. You ever heard that story? About the dragon with multiple heads? You cut one, two more will rise in its place. What do you think will happen when I’m dead? It’s just an organization, man. A club for like-minded folks that want to go back to the way things were. We’re not hurting anybody. I’m not the real enemy here, O’Malley, I’m just a pawn in the—”

Gabriel pulls the trigger. The bullet pierces Walter clean through the skull and his body hits the ground with a thud softened by the plush carpeting. It’s almost disturbing how much the sound doesn’t bother Gabriel anymore. Outside, he can hear kids in the yard screaming their heads off in happiness. He hears a splash, then remembers that the Breachways have a pool. There’s music too, a sharp contrast to the room’s silence and stillness.

Before he leaves, Gabriel takes a detour to the kitchen. It’s empty but there’s a plate of leftover cake waiting for him on the counter amid the general clutter of empty chip bowls and half-eaten hotdogs. He sticks his finger generously into the frosting, licking it clean on his way out the house. 

“I’ll see you Julie,” he says to Walter’s wife when he passes her, giving her a small salute as he goes.

* * *

This is how it ends: with Gabriel walking away from everything.

* * *

Gabriel is in the middle of packing up when there’s a knock on the door, followed by another then another. He doesn’t answer it until Flip starts banging harder, demanding to be let in, his voice urgent, insistent. “I know you’re in there, Gabriel,” he says, right before Gabriel throws the door open and he storms in in all his red-faced fury. He backs Gabriel against the wall, fingers fisted in his shirt, but he didn’t come here to fuck even if their bodies are pressed together, chest to chest, hot and humid. Flip is angry, tense. It’s been all over the news since this afternoon: _bodies found dead, suspect on the loose._

“What did you do Gabriel?”

Gabriel starts to laugh because he can’t help it. He’s had such a long day and his hands are tired and he wants to sleep, and Morello will be on his ass when he finds him or maybe another one of Felix and Walter’s cohorts will beat him to it and it will all finally be over. He’s never turned a job down before, or killed a client, but then there’s a first time for everything. 

“What’s this? Skipping town?” Really, Flip chooses _that_ exact moment to notice the sudden minimalism of Gabriel’s apartment? The two duffel bags on the floor are full of clothes and other belongings Gabriel doesn’t want to be leaving behind. Two guns on the coffee table within reach, and his potted succulent that he managed to keep alive these last few months. And his sole coffee mug with the chip in the handle. Everything else he doesn’t give a shit about is left as is: the clothing he accumulated over the last few months, the standing lamp with the broken switch, the small utilitarian bookshelf he assembled himself.

“It’s getting a little too boring for me, Colorado Springs,” Gabriel says wistfully, and he feels terrible saying it because it just doesn’t feel true at all, but honesty as a concept is still something he's struggling with like a child learning their first word. He lied about why he really left New York, because it’s not about the ghosts that haunted him in his sleep or a question of too much history, it’s the world moving fast and moving on without him. And he’s doing it again now, lying about why he’s leaving: he doesn’t give a shit if he’s got a bounty on his head, it was bound to happen sooner or later with the number of people he's crossed, but he gives a shit about Flip and that’s the most terrifying part, how he'll do just about anything to make sure that Flip is safe, that he's alive, even if that means compromising himself. He'll burn the world down if it comes to it; Gabriel never does anything by halves.

“You have something to do with Kendrickson and Beachway?” Flip finally asks, cutting to the chase.

Gabriel sighs. His teeth hurt; his head hurt. His whole being hurts and he didn't even get shot. “What do you think?” he says.

Flip just shakes his head at him, disappointment in the lines of his mouth and everywhere on his face. “Jesus, Gabriel, I thought you said you didn’t do that anymore.”

“I never said I didn’t, you hypocrite! You just never thought to ask.” Gabriel shoves him off with as much force as he can muster and Flip lets him go, hurt, quiet, watching him move across the room taking things from their hiding places and stuffing them into bags and pockets with more madness than method.

“I thought—” Flip begins to say.

“Never mind what you thought Flip. I did it to keep you safe,” Gabriel says.

Flip throws his hands up in frustration. “But you didn’t have to kill them, Gabriel! You could have come to me. The CSPD could have handled it, hell _I _could have handled it. Why the hell do you think I was undercover for months? We were gonna throw these assholes in prison but now we can’t because you just compromised an investigation. ”

“They wanted you dead!” Gabriel scowls at him, and starts shoving a finger in his chest like a knife to emphasis his point. “Breachway hired me to kill you, all right? You were causing quite the stink. It was either them or you, Zimmerman. What did you want me to do? Stick a knife down your throat?”

Flip looks at him like a lost child. _Yeah asshole_, Gabriel thinks viciously, let that all sink in. _I did it—everything— for you._ He could have gone on with his life; he could have just killed Flip like he was paid to do; he could have done it in his sleep, quickly and discreetly but he didn’t. Though the truth is he _couldn’t_, even if tried.

“You didn’t have to kill them, Gabriel,” Flip repeats quietly. 

“Jesus fuck!” Gabriel chucks a balled up t-shirt at him; it hits him square in the chest which gives him a vicious thrill. “You don’t get it, do you? I don’t want you dead, Zimmerman. Not by their hand or mine. I want you. Alive,” he finishes, and he’s red-faced and out of breath as they stare each other down, neither willing to budge.

Flip is the first to look away, and this propels Gabriel back into motion, zipping his bag shut before tucking his gun into the waistband of his jeans. He shoulders his duffel, carrying the other one by hand. He gives the room a cursory sweep before turning back to face Flip, the only other thing in the room he can’t pack up and take with him wherever he goes. And isn’t that such a shame.

“The CSPD,” Flip says, “They know you’re here.”

Gabriel wishes he were surprised. “And you led them here, let me guess?”

“Not by choice,” Flip tells him, and he looks remorseful already, crossing the room to block Gabriel from leaving. His good hand he uses to squeeze Gabriel on the bicep, and when has Flip touching him without asking started to feel good? The same hand moves up Gabriel’s shoulder and Gabriel is worried for a moment someone would start crying and that someone would be him. He hasn’t cried in a long time but at the same time he's filled with the urge to laugh hysterically.

“They’ll be here any minute,” Flip says, “They’re gonna be hot on your tail for a while so you need to lay low. Stick to the backroads, ditch your car if you can. No more killing if you can help it.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Gabriel says, giving the hand on his face a pointed glance. The corner of his mouth twitches like it wants to smile but can’t make up its mind. “Aren’t you police? Whose side are you on, really?”

“Gabriel,” Flip says, sounding both tired and exasperated. “You have exactly five minutes to leave the building. I’ll try to hold them off but once you’re on the road you’re on your own.”

Gabriel nods, just the once. “So this is it then.”

Flip nods back, looking rueful. His hand leaves Gabriel's shoulder. “Yeah, this is it.”

“Five minutes you said?” Gabriel asks, and when Flip gives him a questioning look, he steps forward to kiss him, deep, messy, lasting just as long as the lilting peak at the end of a sigh, before he takes a step back and nods again, his lips wet from their kiss and parted around a breath. Looking his fill for one last time. Gabriel doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of looking at that handsome face but he’ll probably never see it again so he has to commit it to memory. 

All good things must come to and end, and that’s just how it goes, the story of Gabriel’s fucking life. At least this chapter doesn’t end in a rain of bullets or blood, he thinks. That at least is something new.

“I’ll see you around,” Gabriel says, right before slipping out the door. “Goodbye Phillip.”

“Goodbye Gabriel,” he hears Flip say. But Gabriel doesn’t look back. This is no time for sentiment. He stays resolute, keeps his gaze straight forward. The first step is always the hardest but the ones that come after get easier and easier. He feels like Orpheus, told never to look over his shoulder lest he condemns his lover back to hell. But Gabriel is not the hero of this story; he simply isn’t brave enough to deserve it. He’s just a foot note, a comma, something that Flip will remember had happened to him, once upon a time a long long time ago, a folktale he’d tell his children to keep them from ever going astray. He’s nothing; no one. That’s what made his job so easy in the first place.


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

_Epilogue:_

Ron helps him with the last of the paperwork and that’s it, they’re done for the day. Time to go home, take a nap, get the hell out of the office, which Flip is more than willing to do today of all days. He clocks out after his third ten-hour shift of the week and then he’s walking briskly to the CSPD parking lot where he gets inside his car and drives. It’s a Friday night but he declines Ron and Jimmy’s invitation for drinks. He’s on paid leave for the next day five days; he needs to get his affairs in order.

At his apartment, there’s a carry-on ready and a set of clothes laid out on the bed. He showers, nicks himself shaving because he can’t seem to keep his hands steady. He leaves his car and takes a taxi to the airport. While waiting for his flight to board, he buys two cheese sandwiches and a coffee before hunkering down in the airport lounge, flicking a postcard back to front, front to back. Nothing on it, no note, except an address in untidy handwriting. A touristy photo of Boothbay Harbor in Maine, the water the same crisp color as the sky, dotted by seagulls and white sailboats. 

When it’s time to board, Flip tucks the post card back into his jacket pocket.

* * *

The flight alone takes five hours. Then it’s another fifty minute drive from the airport to the harbor where Flip is dropped off at the only diner in town already open at four in the morning. He’s been awake for over thirty hours but he’s been in stakeouts before and this is nothing. This is just him sitting quietly in a booth drinking his nth coffee as opposed to crouched uncomfortably behind some bushes waiting for a plan of attack. He loses track of time, watching the sun rise up behind the hills and lift the shadows from the water. It’s a great view,all this, breathtaking like something out of a movie. 

Flip doesn’t touch his eggs; he falls asleep leaning against the window, waking up an hour later to the quiet noise of people coming and going. His mouth tastes sour with dried spit and the numbers of coffees drunk. He checks his watch while working the crick out of his neck. 6:21 AM. 

Flip pays for his coffee and leaves a tip on the counter, then with weary feet and burning eyes and exhaustion weighing down every bone in his body, goes in search of a ghost.

The streets widen to a residential neighborhood. The server at the diner gave him directions, said it was hard to miss. Just look for the green door, she said, but it’s still dark out despite the hour and his eyes feel gritty from lack of sleep and every step feels like the last he’ll be able to take. He keeps yawning and blinking, yawning and blinking. He walks past a row of identical houses all with wraparound porches and large bay windows, flowerbeds in the lawn. He walks and the sun continues to rise overhead, lightening the sky in soft pink hues.

Then finally he’s here, he’s arrived: this is the street he’s looking for, the exact block, and Flip washes up against the gate of the driveway having passed the point of sleep. He would almost suspect he’s dreaming but he’s wide awake with his heart pounding like a drum and there’s that green door now, the faded brass numbers visible from where he stands: 116. Flip unlatches the gate and it gives a loud yawning creak. He trudges up the driveway, one staggering foot in front of the other. The porch lights flicker on, one, two. And then there, just beyond the open doorway is Gabriel. 

He’s holding a pistol. 

Gabriel lowers it when Flip comes just within arm’s reach. He’s not smiling but at least he hasn’t shot Flip yet which Flip counts in some way as a minor victory. He’s wearing a robe over his clothes. He looks different, older maybe somewhere in the eyes though it’s only been a year since the hubbub died and Flip has last seen him, his hair longer now, past his forehead and ears, ponytailed. 

“You look like shit,” Gabriel intones, eyeing him from the feet up. “Jesus. You slept at all?”

“No,” Flip answers honestly. He feels strangely detached, blank, like driftwood floating aimlessly in the water. “You look good,” he says, and his feet won’t move even if he wills them to. A full year, he thinks to himself. That’s quite the time to still be thinking about someone.

“It’s the hair isn’t it,” Gabriel says thoughtfully, though he still hasn’t taken his eyes off Flip’s. “I thought growing it longer would be a nice disguise. What do you think?”

Flip doesn’t know whether he likes it or not. He doesn’t know anything. He got the postcard two months ago: addressed to him and sent innocuously to the CSPD. Hopping on a plane to see whether his gut feeling was right had been a gamble, and he’d never been a gambling man and yet: he’s here, face to face with Gabriel. He never believed for a moment that the odds would be in his favor, that the address on the postcard wasn’t some clever ruse to lead him on a merry chase. Gabriel used to wind him up any way he saw fit; Flip wouldn’t put it past him not to even after all this time.

“Aren’t you gonna invite me in?” Flip asks.

Gabriel’s eyes don’t move away from Flip’s face even when he tucks his gun back into the waistband of his pants. 

“Come in,” he says eventually, turning to disappear inside the house. Flip glimpses the pale shell of his ear in the dark, bright like something beckoning him, and he climbs up the porch and through the front door, following Gabriel inside like something that had been summoned. The living room looks, for lack of a better word, homey, with the usual bits and pieces of furniture like any other: a couch and reading chair, a coffee table, an entertainment system in a corner. He has curtains: bland and nondescript, the color of milky coffee, and for some reason or another this takes Flip by surprise. There’s a shelf of how-to books tucked in a corner and a model airplane hanging from the ceiling twisting in the stiff breeze.

Gabriel shuffles to the kitchen to make him coffee while Flip makes himself comfortable on the couch. There are magazines on the coffee table, all on fishing and boating, an empty ashtray next to it as well as a bowl of candies. He takes one, twirling the cellophane wrapper on each end before squeezing it tight in one palm and pocketing it for later. Flip looks around: at how seemingly mundane this all looks, at the lamps and the potted plant and the framed photo of the harbor on the wall, at the home Gabriel has made for himself while in hiding because life goes on and the world keeps moving and not everyone gets second chances but sometimes people get lucky. Or there are people like Gabriel who can lie, cheat, and fight their way out.

Flip runs his fingers across the light film of cigarette ash coating the coffee table, rubs his thumb and forefinger together before slumping on the couch. He can smell coffee brewing in the next room, rich and hot and sharp, and closes his eyes for a second as exhaustion overtakes him. Warmth seeps beneath his eyelids, pulling them down inexorably. He can hear Gabriel in the kitchen, moving around, hissing when he bangs his foot, then turning the radio on with a hiss and scratch of static, and it makes Flip huff in wonder, hearing that: Gabriel, alive, no less startling or amusing than the first day Flip met him. Then he falls asleep.

He comes to late in the afternoon, the living room empty except for him, a mug of cold coffee sitting just within arm’s reach. Sun slants in through the windows, a dreamy almost silty quality to the light. Flip sits up, scrubs his face with his palms, shrugging off the blanket draped over him which smells musty like it hadn’t been used in a while, the way his sweaters often smelled when he was a little kid. His shoes are missing and he panics for a minute until he sees them lined up neatly side by side by the foot of the couch. He glances up when the knob of the front door starts rattling, Gabriel shouldering it open with an armful of fish wrapped in brown paper. He’s fresh from the market, it looks like. It’s late October, chilly, and the wind has bitten his cheeks with a rosy flush. Flip shoots up from the couch and offers to help him carry the fish to the kitchen, but Gabriel looks at him disbelievingly, raising his eyebrows. “I’m not an invalid, Flip. Sit down,” he says, and Flip obeys and sits silently for about half a second before following Gabriel into the kitchen.

It’s even more astonishing to find there’s nothing out of the ordinary about it at all. Gabriel points to the apron hanging from a hook next to the fridge. “Pass me that, will you?” he says, lifting his bloody hands. “You mind putting that on me or—” They share a look, Gabriel willing him to say something, or crack a joke because it’s been a year since Flip has last seen him or touched him. He slips the apron on Gabriel, fastens the knot securely around his waist before stepping back. Gabriel carries on slicing the fish’s belly open, humming a tune under his breath as he works, a lock of hair caught between his lip.

He has deft hands, beautiful and lighting-fast. Flip has no doubt that Gabriel will outdraw him if he remembered to bring his gun. “I hope you like fish for dinner,” Gabriel says, washing his hands now under the sink before wiping them on a nearby towel.

“You cook?”

“That’s how I tend to feed myself, yeah,” Gabriel says, raising an eyebrow. He smirks, turns to duck into the fridge to pull out a carton of orange juice. He takes out a glass from the cupboard, pouring juice into it before sliding it across the counter to Flip, an echo of how he used to serve drinks at the bar at Larry’s where he used to work as a barkeep.

“Thanks,” Flip says, and drinks a mouthful. He waits a beat, then another, watching Gabriel move around the room, preparing pots and ingredients. He can watch him all day, with his forearms exposed, his sleeves pushed up to the elbows. He’s still wearing that necklace. Flip can see the silver cross peeking from the collar of his shirt. 

“So what’s been keeping you busy?” Flip asks, because he can’t help himself, and if he doesn’t say something he’d burst out of his skin. 

“Oh, this and that,” Gabriel answers vaguely, chopping onions now and mincing garlic. He turns to glance over his shoulder at Flip, peering at him from beneath the sway of his long lashes. Flip has to fight the urge to swallow. “You?”

“Same shit,” Flip says, affecting a chuckle, drumming his hand against the counter while the other is curled into a fist in his pocket. “I mean what else is new? Let’s see. I got a new houseplant. I named it Jerry. He’s a cactus, actually. Low maintenance. I’m not very good at keeping plants alive.”

“Seeing anyone?” Gabriel asks, interrupting him. 

Flip doesn’t know how to answer that, but the silence seems to be pressing all around them so he blurts, “What?”

Gabriel gives him a look, knife poised in the air as he pauses in his chopping.

“No,” Flip says, watching Gabriel carefully. His body is full of secrets but Flip didn’t become a detective for nothing; he knows Gabriel’s tells, at least those he let slip, and Gabriel is tense, expectant, holding his breath along with Flip, waiting. “You?” he asks after a second.

Gabriel shrugs one shoulder, turning around and humming again. “No,” he says. 

“Good,” Flip breathes. “Good,” he repeats.

Gabriel laughs. “I didn’t think you would come,” he says. “You told me to lay low, so I did. But you know me, I get bored.”

“You seem perfectly set up over here,” Flip says, “Didn’t take you for a small town guy.”

“I like living by the sea,” Gabriel says, still not looking at him, taking a pan from the cupboard, setting it over the stove which he sets to low heat. “I used to live in this dinky little town by the sea as a kid. Did I ever tell you that? My parents moved from Ireland to America when I was six, seven years old. But I remember that town, clear as day. The smell of the water. How we always ate fish for dinner till we got sick of it.”

“Sounds nice,” Flip says.

Gabriel throws him a smirk over his shoulder before shaking his head. “It was all right. I mean, I was a kid. What the hell did I know? Didn’t really have a choice.”

“Now you do though,” Flip points out. 

Gabriel sighs, then hums quietly. “Now I do,” he agrees.

* * *

Gabriel makes pan fried fish and steamed potatoes for dinner which they wash down with beer while the radio crackles on in the background, filling up the silence in between clinks of cutlery and glass. The food is good, hot, filling. 

Gabriel used to make Flip breakfast, on the mornings he deigned to stay, bacon and eggs and pancakes and coffee strong enough to wake a dead horse, and it was the best thing to wake up to for Flip who had not lived with a lover for years. He took men home from time to time, but they always had an arrangement: don’t ask, don’t tell, kind of like the military and they always left in the morning, sometimes never to be seen again. It worked for a little while though his bubbe often asked him why he was still single when he was a nice young man with a decent job. He couldn’t very well tell her that he liked men; that would break her heart though sometimes Flip suspected she knew more than she let on and just simply chose to ignore the big gay elephant in the room.

Then Gabriel happened, and he was as complicated as they come: muddled past, an arrest record a mile long, inability to tell the truth. Flip didn’t trust him as far as he could throw him but he was gorgeous in bed, absolutely filthy. He did things Flip would still think about even weeks after; he did everything he could get away with; he loved it up the ass. And he was funny and he made Flip angry and crazy in turns and he gunned down Breachway and Kendrickson, cutting Kendrickson up into little pieces, and it was all for him. But why? He’s been thinking about the why for months, putting together the pieces in his head. Why, why, why.

The answer brings him here: eating store-brought pie in the company of a fugitive. He’s risking his life, his whole career, but his foot brushes up against Gabriel’s under the table so he does nothing about it.

It’s dark out already; he can see the sky through the window above the sink. Flip likes to imagine he can hear the sound of the water above the chirp of crickets and song of evening birds if he tries hard enough, never mind that they’re a distance away from the harbor.

The pie is good. Flip loves pie. All kinds: apple, rhubarb, pumpkin, blueberry, peanut butter, pecan, cherry. It’s his dessert of preference. Because candy might be sweet, but pie is warmth and family and home. And this is what that feels like: having a place to rest his head, his feet. Gabriel shows him to the spare bedroom: tiny and cluttered with signs of never being lived in. The wallpaper is a hideous paisley pattern, the window is stuck partway open, wind whistling through the gap. Flip lets a huff roll off his skin as he turns on the shower, waiting for the water to warm up before stepping inside. He returns to the room and finds that the bed has already been made. The light is on too. And there’s Gabriel sitting on the bed, waiting for him. He’s in t-shirt and boxers, sock-covered feet stuffed into a pair of soft bedroom slippers. His longer hair is still tied in a ponytail though it’s looser now, messy. At his throat sits the silver cross he always wears. And maybe it’s the lighting, or Flip having gone so long without seeing him, but he looks young like this, soft, with his knees on display and the sparse film of hair all over his long, lean legs. 

Flip’s hands know very well the shape of those ankles. He’s held them countless times before, propped over his shoulders.

“What are we doing?” Flip says, his feet stuck to the floor. He doesn’t mean just this, Gabriel sitting out here waiting for him, but everything, this whole farce. He traveled all the way to see Gabriel; he’s putting his career on the line, but for what? What the hell are they even doing? Because try as he might, he can’t spin it any other way. Gabriel killed Kendrickson and then Breachway; it was all over the news. Flip saw the bodies; hell, he even saw the report. It was Breachway’s wife who had identified Gabriel; she remembered him by name. If there’s anything his job has taught him it’s that there are two sides to every story; a story might change depending on who is telling it; where it ends and how it begins. And there is a crossroads ahead, closer than he’d thought.

But Gabriel just looks at him calmly, patiently, patting the empty space next to him like he knows all the answers to the universe. And maybe he does, Flip wouldn’t put it past him. “Come sit with me,” he says.

Flip shuts the door behind him. Then he walks over to Gabriel who looks at him without blinking for a long long time, taking him in, the whole of him, before pulling him down on top of him. He scoots farther up the bed, slings a leg around Flip’s hip tight like a vice. Flip doesn’t need any more prompting and pours himself all over him in one fell swoop, letting his hands roam under Gabriel’s shirt greedily before capturing his mouth in a rough open-mouthed kiss. Gabriel tastes like toothpaste, a hint of coffee and bourbon and cigarettes lacing his breath. His body is hot underneath Flip’s hands, his nipples tight, his dick hard, his gasps soft and needy and quick when Flip rubs the flat of his palms across his chest, plucking at his nipples, those pink delicate things. 

Flip is practically thrumming with energy, and it feels like stepping off the edge of a cliff without knowing what’s below, but he looks at Gabriel and thinks, maybe they can do this. He thinks, yes, okay, this doesn’t have to be hard. He thinks, _love._

He fucks Gabriel with slow, lazy thrusts, with their foreheads pressed together and Gabriel’s chest moving with every breath. His shirt hiked up over his nipples, showing marks he’s earned from Flip’s teeth and the faint edges of a scar that trails up his shoulder. Flip stills above him, his cock gripped exquisitely by the tight clutch of Gabriel’s body. He touches his fingers to the cross on Gabriel’s collarbone, the silver cool against his heated skin. “Did you do this with anyone?” he asks, because he’s masochistic too on top of his dumb vices, and he has to know. “In the last few months?”

“What?” Gabriel says, muggy and doe-eyed with pleasure. He laughs, a bright sound that Flip hasn’t heard in a long, long time and it makes his eyes wet. “What do you mean?” he says. “You mean fucking? You wanna know if I’ve fucked anyone in the last nine months? What do you think?”

Flip doesn’t know what to think. When he doesn’t respond immediately, Gabriel sighs and bites shoulder, nudging him on the hip with the heel of his foot. “I have trust issues, you know that about me. You think I’d let anyone fuck me like you fuck me? You think I’d let anyone get close enough? You’re a special fucking case Phillip Zimmerman, and it’s not just because you’ve got a big, beautiful dick.” 

He’s joking, Flip knows this but he still can’t help but hope there’s some other reason too.

“Yeah, why is that? How am I special?” Flip asks, needing to hear him say it, because Gabriel may not know it, but his words have the power to make and remake him. 

“You really want me to say it?” Gabriel says, and they stare each other down, unblinking for a long time until Flip looks away half in embarrassment and in shame before burying his face in Gabriel’s neck where the skin is soft and downy. 

Flip breathes in his tang of sweat, then starts fucking Gabriel again, deep and measured, and they come together, shaking and holding each other like survivors on a life raft set aimlessly adrift. 

Gabriel leaves to fetch a glass of water which he then places on the bedside before sliding next to Flip under the covers. He faces the wall, giving Flip his shoulder, and Flip hems and haws for a good few minutes before slipping his arms around Gabriel’s waist and tucking him against his chest. His hair, longer now, Flip has to push behind one ear. It’s a bit strange, all that red hair curtaining his face, longer even than Flip’s. But it’s something Flip thinks he can get used to: this, Gabriel warm and breathing in his arms, this house by the water with the yellow kitchen walls, peace between them maybe not all the time because then where would the fun be if Gabriel didn’t push his buttons. 

“How long you staying?” Gabriel asks sleepily, running a jagged fingernail over Flip’s forearm, making the skin rise in goosebumps. “Indefinitely?” he jokes.

“Maybe a week,” Flip says. “I’m on leave for a few days.”

_Then what,_ neither of them asks. What comes after?

Flip doesn’t let himself think about it, because he promised himself he wouldn’t. He wants this feeling to last, this, whatever this is. It’s good enough like this, he tells himself. It’s more than good. It’s all he can ask for.

* * *

Gabriel takes him to the docks the next afternoon to show him what he’s done with what he calls a fixer-upper, an old sailboat that barely fits two people but painted brand new. He throws aside the burlap tarp covering it, inspecting the hull for scratches, humming his approval when there doesn’t seem to be any before giving the stern a gentle pat. 

Gabriel beckons Flip over when he sees Flip watching him, hands in his pockets, breathing in the scent of sun and water and sky. He feels like he’s living another life, so far from home with his face wind-chapped from the salt in the air. 

He joins Gabriel on the boat. The sun has started to set, there over the hill, behind the rows of houses, painting everything in soft hues.

Gabriel steers expertly, taking them further and further out to sea till the land becomes a myopic blur in the horizon. But the water is still and calm, and Flip can hear every creak the planks make, every sigh that escapes Gabriel’s mouth, the thud of his own heart. The water is beautiful, the kind of blue you only see in paintings. 

Gabriel brought sandwiches and a cooler of beer. They go through the beer first, then the sandwiches, not talking, just taking in all that they can from the sea. Then Gabriel turns to him, sweeping his hair aside despite the breeze lashing it violently like a sail. The sun isn’t so forgiving on his bare shoulders which are pale and razor-sharp, already freckling. He’s so thin, Flip thinks. He doesn’t know how that skinny body of his can contain all of his personality, how all of Gabriel’s moods and energy can fit under his skin without bursting through. 

Gabriel says, “I could live out here.” He squints at Flip. “You?”

“I wouldn’t mind it.” Flip shrugs, still staring at him and unable to look away for some reason. “But I might get seasick.”

“Seasickness is for the weak,” Gabriel grins. “You’ll learn to live with it. You’ll learn to live with anything, from my experience.”

Flip says nothing in response.

Then Gabriel says without prompting, “If I pushed you off this boat, do you think you could survive?” And Flip shrugs, but this time he walks over to Gabriel at the mast and slides his hands up his hips. They’re safe here; no one can see them—alone, but that also means Flip’s life is now in Gabriel’s hands should he choose to make good on this vague threat. This morning he had woken up to find Gabriel in the backyard breaking ground for new flowerbeds: a whole garden in the back with tomatoes patches and a lemon tree; a family of gnomes lining the footpath, and Gabriel pushing a shovel deep into the earth with his foot, lips curled around a cigarette, fresh dirt streaking his cheek—and Flip wanting him, even then. But want is such a funny word, indiscriminate to how he feels about Gabriel. If this were about want, then it could have just been anyone. Want didn’t compel, or keep a man up at night, wasting away. Want would not have brought Flip here.

“I’d die of a broken heart,” Flip says. “If you threw me over.”

Gabriel laughs, fisting a hand into Flip’s shirt, neither pushing nor pulling but he may as well be because Flip’s chest feels suddenly tight, alive with emotion. Somewhere above, a bird soars over them. Flip watches it dart past and turns his gaze back to Gabriel, looking at him now with a soft smile twitching the edges of his lips. 

“You could kill me now and no one would even know,” he says. 

“I could,” Gabriel agrees, because he hasn’t exactly been subtle about bringing his gun along. “But where would be the fun in that? I prefer to see you live your life in suffering. I’d make your life a living hell.”

“Like you do now,” Flip says before kissing him, hard of hearing now because of the din of his own heart.

“Like I do now,” Gabriel agrees.


End file.
